It’s been more than a decade since a fire engulfed Chicago’s famed Pilgrim Baptist Church, swallowing the roof, melting the copper cornices and consuming the oak balcony, support beams and walls.
But longtime member and current board chairwoman of the Bronzeville church Cynthia Jones can vividly remember the moment in January 2006 when she saw the structure up in flames.
“I was distraught,” said Jones, who arrived on the scene moments after the fire started. “I was so devastated when I saw how quickly it burned. It was a beautiful place. It was a historic church so the woodwork was intricate, ornate.”
So when Jones saw the flames ripping through Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Monday, she said it was like watching her own church burn down all over again.
“The night of the Pilgrim fire, I was there all night. I felt disbelief,” Jones said. “I know how hurt they must feel (in Paris). Spiritually, something like that … it doesn’t shake your faith, but you have to believe something good will eventually come out of it.”
As the devastating fire swept through the 850-year-old Paris landmark — leaving millions of virtual onlookers around the world with feelings of grief and despair — the catastrophe had special resonance for those in the Chicago area whose own houses of worship have turned to ash.
That the Notre Dame fire happened at the start of the Christian Holy Week and just before Easter — with its themes of death and resurrection, of rising from the ashes — added to the poignancy of the Paris conflagration.
For some, like Jones, it felt like a flashback.
“It brought back all the memories,” she said.
Besides Pilgrim Baptist, designed by renowned architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, a number of churches in the Chicago region — many iconic and historic — have been destroyed or severely damaged by fires in recent years.
Shrine of Christ the King in Woodlawn was severely damaged in a 2015 blaze and is still trying to rebuild.
The roof and attic of Holy Name Cathedral — which itself was constructed to replace a building destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — caught fire in 2009 shortly after a renovation but was rebuilt in a matter of months.
In 2012, flames heavily damaged the home of Love, Faith and Praise Church of God in Christ in Englewood, a structure erected in the 1860s.
But the impact on affected communities has varied.
Some larger, wealthier churches have insurance and financial reserves to help with rebuilding, and, like Notre Dame, some have elicited an outpouring of donations. Even available funds, though, can’t replace holy relics, antiques and architectural details that were lost or fully restore the structures to their full glory.
Churches with fewer resources can take years to raise the money, and face complicated hurdles in rebuilding and modernizing the structures.
Still, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs, nearly all congregations commit to rebuilding because of the holy structures’ role in shaping the identity of their congregations, said the Rev. JoAnne Marie Terrell, an associate professor of theology, ethics and the arts at Chicago Theological Seminary.
“Houses of worship are vital to the life of a community because they provide visible symbols of God’s presence,” she said. “It’s a necessary rest stop where people of God pause to pray, meditate, worship and fellowship. … In the midst of uncertainty, houses of faith stand as symbols of stability. We are horrified when they are destroyed by fires.”
For the faithful, though, such destruction can be an opportunity to seek a fresh start and can mirror a spiritual rebirth that religion urges, Terrell said.
“Sad stories can remain as sad stories — or they can be the beginning of a new story,” she said. “I don’t know what the rebuilding of Notre Dame will look like. It will be a testament to people’s resolve, resilience, and love of heritage and history. It will be for a new generation of Parisians a connection to the past and a reaching for the future.”
That’s why, when the fire tore through Holy Name’s roof, one of the first things Monsignor Dan Mayall did was pledge to rebuild the church, which is the seat of the Chicago Archdiocese. He said he also felt compelled to reinforce to his parish that the church is the people who gather — not the building.
“We had to say, right at the beginning, ‘We are a place to worship God, and that worship goes on,’ ” Mayall said. “It was heartbreaking for the people who went there all the time.”
Like Notre Dame, if on a smaller scale, Mayall noted that Holy Name is “right in the middle of the city, so it’s not just a parish church. It is also a tourist attraction.”
Immediately, Mayall and the church leadership moved the worship services to a simpler building, and all the weddings, baptisms and first communions continued without interruption, he said. The Archdiocese of Chicago was able to repair the building in less than six months.
“What it showed me is people’s faith is stronger than a tragedy,” Mayall said. “They kept coming to church and they kept being the people of God. When we reopened, they came back stronger than ever. People had faith and instinctively believed.”
Mayall added that Notre Dame has stood for centuries, “through wars, natural disasters and natural problems that happen to a building that old. It’s been through its challenges, but it stayed there. The building is not eternal, it can’t be. But every human being has the promise of eternity.”
In Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, St. Paul’s Church was destroyed by fire in 1956. By 1958, the structure had been rebuilt.
In some ways, the fire triggered a major change for the congregation, and its impact still endures. When St. Paul was reconstructed, the congregation had a new building but also financial strains. Nearby, the Church of the Redeemer was rapidly losing members, the church’s documented history shows.
A decision was made to merge the congregations, said the Rev. Catherine Healy, the rector at what is now St. Paul & the Redeemer Church.
“There are very few people left here that remember the fire,” Healy said. “People do talk about the merger, because it was a seismic shift.”
Because the two churches worshipped differently, they had to develop a new style when they came together, Healy explained. The congregation had to develop new relationships and bond with new leadership.
“The merger initially was a merger of convenience of two congregations with different ideas of how worship should look,” Healy said. “It forced the congregation to look at what is core to who we are as Christian believers. Some compromising, growing and changing is necessary for us as a church.”
At the Shrine of Christ the King church in Woodlawn, a grassroots effort to renovate the structure was underway when it was accidentally set ablaze by a volunteer worker in October 2015. Like Notre Dame and Pilgrim Baptist, the fire ripped through the roof, and debris and heavy wooden beams fell onto the pews, the altar and the stage, destroying nearly everything. What the fire and smoke didn’t touch was ruined by the water used to extinguish the blaze, said the Rev. Canon Matthew Weaver.
“It was a raging fire. It devoured the roof. Everything was this black smoke so thick you could sculpt out of it. For five hours, the church just burned, burned, burned,” Weaver said. “There was almost no hope.”
But then their tragedy turned into a testament to the power of God, Weaver said. With all the destruction, the Fire Department was able to rescue the church’s Divine Infant Jesus statue, which was made in Spain and dates to the 1700s. It depicts Jesus as a toddler, holding a globe in his left hand, with his right hand facing upward in a gesture interpreted as him blessing the world.
“The only thing damaged on the Infant Jesus statue is something knocked off his left hand,” Weaver said. “It’s as if the devil wanted to take the world out of his hand so he couldn’t bless the world. We restored it, putting the world back in his hand so he could bless it.”
And from that moment, the modest and relatively young religious order vowed to rebuild.
It’s been four years, and they are making progress. They have installed a firm new metal roof on the building, and crews are still working to stop leaks.
Inside the sanctuary are sheets of plywood, electrical cords and buckets filled with nails. Ladders, tools and building materials are scattered throughout the structure, which has been gutted and fenced off.
In an ideal world, the congregation would raise the estimated $10 million it needs to complete all three phases of the work and finish everything in five years — in time for the building’s centennial, Weaver said. But, he emphasized, everything in God’s time.
“God allows something that seems tragic so we can know that our hope is in the eternal,” he said. “What we have is not lost. It’s glorified.”
At Pilgrim, the road to recovery has, at times, been fraught. For years, the small congregation and leadership tried to raise the estimated $37 million to rebuild the house of worship, which is considered the birthplace of modern gospel music. But even a controversial $1 million boost from the state didn’t help.
In 2011, the church announced a recovery plan that never materialized. Four years later, frustrated neighbors began pushing for something to be done about the fragile structure.
Back then, as now, the facade of the church is braced by steel beams that extend from the outer walls into the street.
In 2017, Don Jackson, the CEO of Central City Productions which produces a major gospel music awards show and is a television syndication company, announced a new vision for the site. Keeping the exterior of the building to preserve its history, he wants to rebuild the church and repurpose it as the National Museum of Gospel Music
“For the African-American community — James Cleveland, Albertina Walker, Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey — this is where these artists got their start,” Jackson said. “That church was the first to welcome African-Americans when they arrived from the South. It has so much history and relevance beyond just being a church.”
But Jackson needs millions more dollars to turn his vision into reality. He has pledged $1 million toward the project and expects another $1 million to come from high-profile gospel music artists.
He remains optimistic that his museum project will break ground this year.
On Easter Sunday, when the Stellar Gospel Music Awards air on BET, there will be a special appeal to viewers to donate toward the development of the gospel museum.
Jackson said he hopes the recent Notre Dame fire will call attention to the rebuilding efforts right here.
“If the Notre Dame can get a billion (dollars), why can’t we get our $38 million to rebuild Pilgrim as a museum?” he said. “I hope people will compare Notre Dame with a fire that happened here in Chicago. I hope it opens eyes out there.”
Twitter @lollybowean