Drive through West Humboldt Park, to the edge of Austin, and it’s still there — Our Lady of the Angels parish, site of one of the most tragic fires in American history.

At 3814 W. Iowa is where Our Lady of the Angels Catholic School once stood, and where 92 children and three nuns lost their lives on Dec. 1, 1958, in a school fire that shocked the nation.

The rebuilt Catholic school eventually closed in 1999. Today, Galapagos Charter School leases the site.

The once majestic Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church at 3800 W. Iowa seemed to stand guard over the school until it fell into crumbling disrepair and was closed by the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1990. Until 2009, a small Baptist congregation had been renting it.

Its parish buildings — a rectory at 3808 W. Iowa, a convent at 3815 W. Iowa, and Kelly Hall, its parish center at 824 N. Hamlin — had long been shuttered, and just as dilapidated as the church.

But out of the ashes, shaking off the ghostly robes of tragedy, hope is being reborn here.

And that journey will culminate when Our Lady of the Angels church reopens, which is expected to take place next month.

“I didn’t know the history of this place until I got here. To be honest, it was depressing,” says the Rev. Bob Lombardo, the driving force behind the rebirth of the well-known West Side parish.

The Franciscan priest arrived at Our Lady of the Angels in February 2005, when it was as devoid of life as any tomb. Moving into the huge parish with only his German shepherd, he took stock.

And that assessment of needs — both of the bricks and mortar he’d just inherited and that of its poverty- and crime-stricken neighborhood — has led to what supporters say is nothing short of a miracle on Iowa Street.

Today, the newly renovated rectory is home to the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, a Catholic outreach on the West Side of Chicago, and a flowering new Franciscan community of young adults in their 20s and 30s who showed up as volunteers to help “Father Bob,” and found their calling.

The parish center has been completely rehabbed under a partnership forged by the mission with the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago. Operating today as the Kelly Hall YMCA, the center provides after-school tutoring, sports, arts and other programs to some 900 neighborhood kids weekly.

It also provides healthy living, art and computer classes for many neighborhood elderly.

And through a partnership with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, some 150 low-income children and elderly who attend the center’s programs daily are fed healthy meals. On a monthly basis, 700 poor families receive food and clothing, through the mission’s weekly pantry distribution, and from a Food Depository mobile pantry that trucks in fresh produce and staples every first Saturday of the month.

On the first Saturday of December, the line of neighborhood residents awaiting food snaked down the block despite the rain and chilly temperatures.

The convent, too, is newly rehabbed, offering a 35-bedroom retreat space available to interested groups — and housing for a never-ending stream of volunteers who have come from all walks of life over the past six years to make the rebirth possible.

They include college kids and youth groups, alumni from Lombardo’s alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, and construction workers from local unions — lots of them. Local corporations have also sent volunteers.

Everything from materials and labor to furniture and food has been and continues to be donated.

“You talk to one person, and they may know three other people who can help. A lot of it has been word of mouth,” says the soft-spoken Lombardo, whose order’s primary mission is to aid the poor.

A co-founder of the New York-based Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the 54-year-old Catholic priest had been recruited by Cardinal Francis George to resurrect Our Lady of Angels.

In his love for the poor, Lombardo is gifted at building relationships, George said recently on the Archdiocese-produced cable television program, “The Church, the Cardinal and You.”

Lombardo built relationships with the unions, for example — from carpenters and plumbers to bricklayers and pipe-fitters — that led to several using the 71-year-old church for their apprentice training programs as the renovation progressed over the past two years.

“I had known about the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal before I came to Chicago, and as I was looking at the different places where the church is, and even when there aren’t many Catholics, looking at how can we be present. That neighborhood is a rather dangerous place, and I thought it was almost a natural for a group that just wants to be present to the poor,” George said.

“Father Bob very generously came, and through his contacts and his good will, and his kind of joyful Christian presence, he has … created something from the original, that kind of puts the church right there as a symbol of hope, an oasis of peace in a very difficult place.”

The middle-class, mostly Italian neighborhood that suffered the heartbreaking tragedy in 1958 today is predominantly Hispanic and African American, one of the poorest in Chicago, and also one of the most dangerous.

But in the tradition of the legendary “Skid Row Priest” and co-founder of Haymarket Center, Monsignor Ignatius D. McDermott, or “Father Mac,” Lombardo regularly walks the streets of the neighborhood, reaching out to residents, seeking out their needs and inviting them to the mission.

For four years, Lombardo lived alone there.

“I had my trusty German shepherd, Liberty. So the three of us moved in, me, Jesus and Libby,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that you have to just jump in. You can’t teach people to swim from the side of the pool. If I wanted to show people what we needed to do here, I had to start doing it. Then people really came forward.”

It will be a glorious day when the church opens, the last piece of the… READ THE FULL ARTICEL ON THE CHICAGO SUNTIMES: http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/9348735-418/shaking-off-ghostly-robes-of-tragedy-our-lady-of-angels-church-to-reopen.html