His Eminence Cardinal Francis George will be coming to the historic St. Francis of Assisi Church on Sunday, August 26 at 3:30PM to bless the new Pastoral Center at 813 W. Roosevelt Rd., just east of the main Church. The St. Francis of Assisi Church is the oldest Spanish speaking Catholic Church in Chicago and was the place where Cardinal George's father was baptized when, prior to the 1920s, it was a German Catholic Church.

Says Carlos Villasenor, member of the St. Francis of Assisi Preservation Committee, "We are very grateful to have Cardinal George come here to bless us and our new Pastoral Center. He is a holy man and a great leader, our spiritual leader. It is very important to us that he has a personal tie, a family tie to our Church. He inspires us. But we are also nervous and feel threatened, that UIC continues to threaten our existence. What UIC is doing to our physical environment harms us. First UIC tried to have us kicked out and our Church to be torn down. They are still after us but now they get at us in more subtle ways."

Aureliano Bermudez, another member of the Preservation Committee, comments, "This is serious. UIC has taken it upon themselves to redesign the public streets and sidewalks by us and they do not consult us. First they cut off Newberry Street, which is how we get to our parking lots. We can no longer get to our Church from Halsted via Maxwell Street. We now all have to get to Church by one entry point, from Roosevelt Road. That causes congestion. Then they narrow the streets, which further causes more congestion. We Mexicans have big families and many of us drive vans. It is hard to have vans travel two ways on a narrow dead-end street. It seems UIC wants to segregate us, cut us off, from the rest of the South Campus area. We are people too."

"We do a lot of socializing on our sidewalks and have vendors sell us food after Mass. So UIC puts concrete garden boxes to clutter our sidewalks and this makes it difficult for us to keep our community culture. We like flowers but people are more important than flowers. Those concrete boxes have to be removed. And then they put a light pole in the middle of our sidewalk by our gymnasium. That can hurt our children."

"I called James Gimpel, the Director and Executive Architect of UIC's South Campus Project. He hung up on me twice. Then I got an answering machine. Finally, through the intercession of a UIC official, I got to talk to him and all he said was 'we'll see'. That was insulting and arrogant. All we want is for them to be good neighbors but UIC is suffocating our community."

For more information about Maxwell Street and the Call for a Boycott of UIC's new dorm and University Village, visit the website <www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html> or call 312-341-3696.

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