Chicago Bishop Robert Lombardo

The first Italian American to be ordained a bishop in Chicago, Fr. Bob Lombardo has served the poorest of the poor and resurrected a church close to the heart of our community.

In the hush of Holy Name Cathedral, with hundreds of Catholics in attendance, the former Fr. Bob Lombardo knelt before Cardinal Blase Cupich in a Nov. 13 ceremony to receive an anointing with oil, a ring, a miter and a staff. That day, amid many joyous congratulations, Lombardo became the first Italian American, and the first Franciscan, to be ordained a bishop in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Bishop Lombardo’s arrival in Chicago 15 years earlier was much humbler. Fresh from working with the poorest of the poor in the Bronx, Honduras and Bolivia, Lombardo faced the task of rebuilding a parish from the ashes of one of Chicago’s greatest tragedies, one that devastated the Italian-American community in particular.

On Dec. 1, 1958, Lombardo was a toddler growing up in a large, loving Italian-American family in Stamford, a Connecticut town with a significant Italian population. On that same day in Chicago, a fire escalated into an inferno that destroyed Our Lady of Angels Catholic School. The fire killed 92 school children and three nuns, gripping the city in grief. Following the tragedy, the residents of the predominantly Italian-American parish moved away to escape the unspeakable loss, and both the West Humboldt Park neighborhood and the parish buildings fell into decline. Over the decades, new residents, besieged by poverty and the gangs who preyed on them, moved in.

This was the situation Lombardo, now 63, stepped into in 2005. Cardinal Francis George, who had never forgotten the parish and its tragedy, asked Lombardo to come to Chicago to restore it.

The buildings had deteriorated to an unusable condition, and fixing them up seemed nearly impossible. Lombardo enlisted volunteers, from fellow Notre Dame University alumni to former parishioners to skilled tradesmen. He created partnerships with nonprofits. Though he had already co-founded an order of Franciscans while in the Bronx, he founded yet another in Chicago, the Franciscans of the Eucharist.

Today, those Franciscans run a food pantry, community dinners, youth and senior programs, summer Bible camps, retreats, prayer and more out of the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels. They serve everyone from children to seniors in the lower-income neighborhood, which is made up largely of African-American and Hispanic-American residents. Lombardo speaks Spanish, which helps him communicate with neighbors and parishioners alike.

He will continue in a leadership role at the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels but will turn over daily operations to the Franciscans while he performs episcopal duties.

Lombardo’s duties as bishop of the archdiocese’s Vicariate 3 — a large swath of Chicago west of downtown — include overseeing its 52 churches, 25 Catholic schools and three Catholic hospitals. He’ll need to keep parishes functioning smoothly, be a spiritual leader, ensure the schools are serving their students, and make sure the priests, nuns and laity are taken care of. That’s in addition to visiting churches for occasions like first communions, confirmations and other special events.

When he got the phone call that he was to become a bishop, “My reaction was shock and then numb,” Lombardo says. “But I talked to Cardinal Cupich, and he said just trust in God. God will give you the strength and the grace. It’s God’s work. We have to do it with a generous spirit. It’s a gateway to understanding that I just have to say yes.”

That spirit of saying yes is also what led him to become a priest. As a student at Notre Dame, Lombardo was a residential advisor in his dorm when a student contracted spinal meningitis. Lombardo accompanied that student in the ambulance to the hospital, where the young man lost consciousness and later died.

“That experience, when everybody was getting ready to graduate, you stop and think, ‘What is life really about?’” Lombardo says. “Whenever people have, for lack of a better term, a powerful event in their lives, it shakes the roots a bit. As time goes on, things go back to ‘normal,’ but that thought never left, and I thought, ‘I really need to pursue this.’”

So after graduating in 1979 with a degree in accounting and working for about two years at Price Waterhouse, Lombardo began to explore priestly formation as a Franciscan Capuchin friar in 1980. He took final vows in 1986 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1990 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

“I’m grateful for the business background at Notre Dame and Price Waterhouse,” Lombardo says. “Those skills have been very valuable in the church. We’re taking care of parishes and institutions, and they all have budgets.”

Reflecting, he adds, “As you get older, you realize how God puts things in place for his purposes, but at the time, it might not make sense.”

He can distill his goals for the future very simply: “They’re two-fold: to grow in my relationship with the Lord and to help other people do the same.”

As he pursues those goals, he takes inspiration from the lives of the saints. “We have had many in our age,” he says, citing Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II as examples. While working in the Bronx, Lombardo met Mother Teresa because her order of nuns ran a shelter in the area, and the friars and nuns would help one another.

“When Mother would come into town, they would say, ‘Come over and say hello,’” Lombardo recalls.

Lombardo spent his youth immersed in family and faith. “On Sunday, we went to church. We went to the cemetery to visit dead relatives. … Then it was always visiting grandparents, great-grandparents.”

His mother’s family hails from Sassano in the province of Salerno in Campania, and his dad’s side comes from Santa Rosa in Calabria. With his grandparents each having more than 10 siblings, there were always lots of aunts and uncles to visit.

“You ate everywhere you went. It was family time, and even as I grew older, there were always people coming over. My immediate and extended family were always a ton of fun to be with,” Lombardo says.

Italianità lives on at the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels with an annual St. Joseph Table organized by Mary Ann Paolantonio and other volunteers with connections to the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish and Shrine in Melrose Park.

For anyone interested in volunteering, Lombardo says the mission’s website, missionola.com, lists needs, from professional skills to tutoring to helping with the food pantry.

“A lot of our people work in service industries, like in hotels, and our neighborhood has been crushed by COVID,” Lombardo says. “We have a huge number of people unemployed or underemployed, and we’ve tripled to quadrupled our outreach. At the same time, people have been extremely generous in helping out.”

The above appears in the March 2021 issue of the print version of Fra Noi. Our gorgeous, monthly magazine contains a veritable feast of news and views, profiles and features, entertainment and culture. To subscribe, click here.