Shrine of The Sacred Heart (Polish Jesuits)

The Shrine of the Sacred Heart at 5835 W. Irving Park Road opened its doors in February 2001, but its roots go back nearly seventy years earlier. In 1933, Polish Jesuits established a small chapel inside a private Jesuit residence at 4105 North Avers Avenue on Chicago's northwest side. The chapel housed an image of Our Lady of Częstochowa and gradually attracted Polish-speaking faithful seeking ministry in their mother tongue. Through the decades — and especially during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II and the era of Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s and 1990s — the chapel's congregation swelled far beyond what the modest Avers Avenue location could hold. Around the turn of the millennium, the Polish Jesuit community recognized that the traditional territorial ethnic-parish model no longer fully served a new wave of Polish immigrants and the American-born generations of Polonia. They concluded that what was needed was an extra-territorial, relational space — a 'home' for Polish Catholics across the Chicago metropolitan area. To that end, in February 2001 the Jesuits purchased a building at 5835 W. Irving Park Road in the Portage Park neighborhood and renovated it for pastoral use. The new Jezuicki Ośrodek Millenijny (JOM) — Jesuit Millennium Center — opened that same month, combining a chapel (designated the Shrine of the Sacred Heart) with offices, a library, café, and meeting halls. The name 'Sacred Heart' reflects two intertwined threads. First, the Polish Jesuits in America were historically the publishers of the magazine Posłaniec Serca Jezusa (Polish Messenger of the Sacred Heart), through which they cultivated devotion to the Sacred Heart for decades; though the periodical is no longer printed, the attachment endures. Second, the Society of Jesus itself has been the order most associated with propagating the Sacred Heart devotion ever since St. Claude La Colombière, SJ championed the visions of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 17th-century France. The shrine's chapel was designed with a central image of the Merciful Christ and the Sacred Heart to encourage interior silence amid the noise of Chicago. In its first decade, the shrine exploded in popularity: by the mid-2000s, the seven or eight Polish-language Masses celebrated on a typical weekend drew roughly 4,500 worshippers, with the Sunday Mass for young families routinely filling the chapel with about 1,000 people. Changing immigration and economic patterns have since reduced that figure to approximately 2,000 weekend Mass-goers, of whom about half live in Portage Park and the remainder travel from across the Chicago area and beyond, some from as far as 60 miles away. The shrine's 25th anniversary (Silver Jubilee) is being celebrated in 2026. The central jubilee Mass is scheduled for Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 1:00 pm, presided over by Bishop Robert Fedek. The year will also feature an 'Extreme Way of the Cross' through Chicago streets, Lenten retreats, and other commemorative events. From its beginnings as a humble Avers Avenue chapel to its current role as the spiritual and cultural heart of Polish Chicago, the Shrine of the Sacred Heart has remained — in the words of its founders — a place 'where anyone who comes can find a haven, rest, and the help they need in the work of building themselves and their relationships.'