Diverse Urban Parish Shares Rich Latino Traditions The church building at St. Viator Parish in Chicago dates back to 1927 and features high Gothic ceilings, rich stained glass artwork and a beautiful stone-carved sanctuary. But increasingly, parishioners’ Latino culture brings the historic church alive.
José and Gemma Candido Rangel along with Antonio and Virginia Gallegos already provide leadership in various ways. Throughout the year they collect and prepare food and serve it to those in need. At Thanksgiving, they served more than 400 people. Realizing that service must be continually nourished spiritually, they provide retreats for various groups such as young people, adults and singles.
With its lively music, hand clapping and pageantry at Masses celebrated Mass celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe in Spanish, the parish’s diversity and vibrancy is on full display. Fr. Charles Bolser, CSV, pastor, recognizes that and he is partnering with members of the Latino community to deepen parish unity through lay empowerment and peer ministry. He recently invited six parish members to consider becoming Viatorian pre-associates. Fr. Bolser envisions that with lay associates and professed Viatorians working together in ministry – on equal footing – the parish life will continue to grow and become stronger.
Reenactment of the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego of Tepeyac
Each week, José, Antonio and Virginia lead the music for the Sunday Spanish Mass and for the Thursday night charismatic prayer session. Their enthusiasm Antonio and Virginia Gallegos and José Rangel lead the music at the Thursday evening prayer sessions.
From the Archives… Access and Preservation of Viatorian A Digitization projects are the big push for archives, museums, historical societies and libraries these days. In today’s world of Internet access and Web 2.0 technologies, researching in person is happening less and less. Finding entire collections and catalogs online is happening more and more.
rich with Viatorian history of events and people in the community during those early developing years of the province. And most are in good condition – having been preserved in a controlled environment. Access to these online, with browse and search capabilities, will promote research of the Viatorian Community in the United States.
So how does a small, religious, nonprofit archives handle this? Well, this past summer the Viatorian Community Archives acquired state-of-the-art equipment, an Atiz BookDrive Pro scanner, to aid in this task. This scanner is equipped with overhead cameras to capture the images and software that flattens the curvature of the pages of bound books that sit in its cradle. Joan Sweeney
At the moment, there are two long-term book digitization projects happening in the Viatorian Community's archives: The newspaper from the St. Viator College collection, The Viatorian, consists of 48 bound volumes (approximately 13,000 pages) dating from 1883-1938. The newspapers are
Joan Sweeney carefully scans a book from Belize dating back to the 1860s with the Atiz Book Drive Pro scanner for the Viatorian archives.
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