Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago from 1982 to 1996, was arguably one of the most prominent figures in the American Catholic church in the post-Vatican II era, rallying progressives with his "seamless garment ethic" and his ecumenical initiatives.

[3] The first Catholic presence in present-day Illinois was that of a French Jesuit missionary, Reverend Jacques Marquette, who landed at the mouth of the Chicago River on December 4, 1674.

[6] In 1795, the Potawatomi nation signed the Treaty of Greenville that ended the Northwest Indian War, ceding to the United States its land at the mouth of the Chicago River.

[9] In 1833, Jesuit missionaries in Chicago wrote to Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis, pleading for a priest to serve the 100 Catholics in the city.

[8] At a cost of $400, Saint Cyr constructed St. Mary, a small wooden church near Lake and State Streets.

[8] Quarter secured the passage of a state law in 1845 that declared the bishop of Chicago an incorporated entity, giving him the power to hold real estate and other property in trust for religious purposes.

One of their projects was the St. Xavier Female Seminary, a secondary school that attracted students from wealthy Catholic and Protestant families.

[16] On October 3, 1848, Pope Pius IX appointed Reverend James Van de Velde of the Society of Jesus as the second bishop of Chicago.

[14] Suffering from severe rheumatism during the harsh Chicago winters, Van De Velde persuaded the pope in 1852 to appoint him as bishop of the Diocese of Natchez in Mississippi.

[25] Duggan faced challenges in Chicago: the legacy of the decade-long lack of leadership in the diocese, the aftereffects of the financial panic of 1857, and of the American Civil War.

Irish-born priests were hostile to Dugan's stand against the Fenian Brotherhood: he denied the sacraments to anyone tied to this secret society.

Some clergy faulted Duggan for failing to support the University of St. Mary of the Lake, which closed in 1866 due to financial problems and low enrollment.

When he left Chicago for a European trip, several diocesan priests wrote to the Vatican, questioning Dugan's mental health.

[27] Three years later, in 1869, Pius IX sent Duggan to a sanitarium in St. Louis and appointed Monsignor Thomas Foley as coadjutor bishop to operate the diocese.

[28] In October 1871, the diocese suffered nearly a million dollars in property damage in the Great Chicago Fire, including the destruction of St. Mary's Cathedral.

[31] Foley invited the Franciscans, Vincentians, Servites, Viatorians, and Resurrectionist religious orders to establish parishes and schools in the diocese.

While the existing Irish and German communities expanded, Polish, Bohemian, French-Canadian, Lithuanian, Italian, Croatian, Slovak and Dutch Catholics arrived in the archdiocese, bringing their own languages and cultural traditions.

The parishes provided the new immigrants with familiar fraternal organizations, music, and language, safe from xenophobia and anti-Catholic discrimination.

After Feehan died in 1902, Leo XIII in 1903 named Bishop James Quigley from the Diocese of Buffalo as the next archbishop of Chicago.

[40] In 1910, Quigley approached Reverend Francis X. McCabe, president of DePaul University, about the lack of higher education opportunities for Catholic women in the archdiocese.

[42] The next archbishop of Chicago was Auxiliary Bishop George Mundelein from the Diocese of Brooklyn, appointed by Pope Benedict XV on December 9, 1915.

Pope John Paul II in 1982 chose Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati as Cody's replacement.

Bernardin found an archdiocese in disarray, its priests disheartened by arbitrary administration and charges of financial misconduct under Cody.

[54] The archdiocese also established covenants with the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago in 1986 and with the Metropolitan Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1989.

The State of Illinois had ruled that it would not fund any charities that refused to consider same-sex couples as foster care providers or adoptive parents.

However, the archdiocese objected to the new route, saying the parade would pass by Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church during Sunday morning mass.

George told an interviewer: "you don't want the Gay Liberation Movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.

"[59][60] City administrators negotiated a compromise plan that delayed the parade start by two hours, allowing it to pass by Our Lady after its mass concluded.

[62] In 2016, increasing costs, low attendance at mass and priest shortages prompted the archdiocese to close or consolidate up to 100 parishes and schools over the next 15 years.

A three-story, red brick building, it is one of the oldest structures in the Astor Street District, according to the Landmarks Preservation Council.