Parishioners at a Catholic church in Avondale where a priest who burned a gay pride flag was removed by Cardinal Blase Cupich shared a range of feelings Sunday about the absence of their pastor.
“If he’s not going to be here, I’m not going to be here either,” one elderly woman said brusquely as she walked into Mass at Resurrection Catholic Church, offering unwavering support for Father Paul Kalchik and adding no further comment.
Cupich sent two of his top deputies to the church on Friday to notify Kalchik he was being removed as pastor, according to two sources close to the Priest.
The 56-year-old priest first announced in a September 2 church bulletin that he planned to burn the LGBTQ-friendly flag — which featured a cross superimposed over a rainbow — after he found it in storage where it apparently sat for more than a decade.
Cardinal Cupich told Kalchik not to burn the flag, but the priest said he did it anyway “in a quiet way” during a closed ceremony on September 14 with seven parishioners, featuring a prayer of exorcism over the torched banner.
Longtime parishioner Ricardo Vargas said he hopes the church gets its p\Pastor back, but that he finds Father Kalchik’s views on the connection between child sex abuse and homosexuality to be misguided.
“He doesn’t realize that the people who hurt him who may have had gay tendencies were not loving gay people,” Vargas said. “I support Father Kalchik, but I don’t support his statements that it was gayness that caused the problems or it was gayness that hurt these people. It was the people themselves and the evil that they were doing,” he said.
In an interview three days before that visit, Kalchik told the Sun-Times: “What have we done wrong other than destroy a piece of propaganda that was used to put out a message other than what the church is about?”
The Reverend James Kaczorowski, pastor of Queen of Angels parish, was appointed administrator of Resurrection.
The Most Reverend Mark Bartosic, an Auxuliary Bishop who oversees about 50 churches, of which Resurrection is one, presided over Mass Sunday.
“I’m here today simply to invite you to trust in the power of the word,” Bartosic told parishioners. “The word is much more powerful than any chaos, interior or exterior, that we can come up with as a race, as human beings,” he said.
Bishop Bartosic, who claims to be a friend of Father Kalchick and belongs to the same book club, said the Priest left Saturday voluntarily.
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