Mass celebrated on Chicago streets where people were gunned down

Published: 2007-09-20

CHICAGO (CNS) -- Violence can happen anywhere. But when Israel Morales, a neighborhood organizer and parishioner at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish on Chicago's Southwest Side, was gunned down this summer near the church, community members decided they had to do something. The first thing they did was have a Mass outside, near where Morales was killed. Since then, the parish has had three more street Masses, with another set for Sept. 27, all on blocks where violence has occurred. The first Masses drew 120 to 150 people; one in late August had more than 200 in the congregation. "There's something in the ancient ritual of reconsecrating ground that has been violated in some way," Father Stan Rataj, the pastor, told The Catholic New World, Chicago's archdiocesan newspaper. "I think it makes a statement to the people." Father Rataj and the associate pastor, Father Roger Diaz, take turns as the main celebrant of the bilingual Masses, although both are at all of them.

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