March 2, 2025 marked the 140th Anniversary of the founding of St. Procopius. We have two items related to the commemoration to share: first, the sermon of Fr. James Flint for Sunday's Mass; and second, a slide show put together by Prior Guy Jelinek.
Sermon for the 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time / Founders' Day 2025
One hundred forty years ago today — March 2 was a Monday in 1885 — a Benedictine priest arrived in Chicago and made his way to St. Procopius Parish in the Pilsen neighborhood.
He began his sojourn there by arranging to offer Mass and so beg God’s help with the work upon which he was embarking. Then he met with the pastor, Father William Coka, the founder of this parish that had become the largest of Czech ethnicity in the United States. Father Coka brought the monk to see the Archbishop of Chicago, Patrick Augustine Feehan, who welcomed and formally named Father John Nepomucene Jaeger the new pastor of St. Procopius. Over the next days, two other monks arrived, and so began the Benedictine community that became, in God’s good time, St. Procopius Abbey. The monastery formally transferred to Lisle in 1914 and even earlier had established out here in the countryside the schools now known as Benet Academy and Benedictine University.
We read a few minutes ago from the Book of Sirach:
The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind. Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are tested.
Jesus develops the same idea in our Gospel passage, saying, “from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” Those early monks had something good in their heart to speak, for they had the Word of God and all the other treasures of our Holy Faith to share, in those early decades primarily with their fellow Czech immigrants, but then also with the wider Catholic population, doing what St. Paul called “the work of the Lord.” They spread the Gospel by means of the press they established, by administering the sacraments, by teaching, and, most fundamentally, by living the monastic life bequeathed them by St. Benedict and the entire tradition inherited from ages past.
As for Fr. John Nepomucene, with whom this adventure began, he was named our first Abbot by Pope Leo XIII and so led the monks into the twentieth century. In 1908, as the school here in Lisle had its graduation ceremonies, he encountered one of the teenage students and asked amiably about his academic progress. The boy reported that he was doing all right with his classes but nevertheless would have to give up studies, because his parents were dead, and the little money they had left him was exhausted. Well, said the aging Abbot, you just go to that rector and tell him to send the bills to me. If you work hard, we’ll find a way to keep you enrolled. They did, and close to seventy years later I heard the tale from that boy, who as Father Peter was one of the grand old men of the monastery when I stumbled my way into the community.
The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.
In my totally prejudiced mind, Father, Abbot, John Nepomucene Jaeger and his brethren in the monastic life passed with flying colors the test set before them by this text of Scripture. As the Abbey observes this its 140th birthday today, I ask your prayers that we may always be faithful to the task given us by Christ, and that our numbers may increase so that we might continue to carry out “the work of the Lord” in the years and decades and centuries ahead.
Comments