Foundation of the Chicago Province
Prior to the merger, the Techny campus had begun an extensive rebuilding campaign. The distinctive towers building had, for a time, become a “mission museum” called Word Alive!, which was intended to serve as a fundraising and vocational tool. Other parts of the campus, like the farm buildings and nursing home, were razed. While still an important center for the SVDs, the province simply did not need as much land as it once had, and over the decades Chicago’s northern suburbs had become a desirable location for both commercial and residential development.
In 1985 Techny began the process of investigating what to do with that land. This campaign was led by Rev. Francis Kamp SVD, who had for years overseen the global fundraising efforts of Techny’s Mission Office. Fr. Kamp’s efforts yielded a plan that retained 150 acres for Techny’s Divine Word campus, while 250 acres were leased for commercial and residential use. This was an enormous undertaking, and through the decades-long process Fr. Kamp became a well-known and well-respected local figure in the surrounding municipalities.
With the creation of the Chicago Province came new mission responsibilities. One of them took the SVDs out of the United States all together. By 1985, the Divine Word Missionaries had been staffing a small mission in the Caribbean for over a decade, but it was not until the provincial merger that it began to blossom. The mission was the brainchild of Bp. Joseph Bowers SVD, a native of the Caribbean island of Dominica. After his time in Ghana as Bishop of the Accra Diocese, Bowers was chosen to oversee the newly created Diocese of St. John’s-Basseterre in 1971, and he in turn asked the SVDs to assist him in providing his diocese with clergy.
As the Caribbean was not considered a permanent SVD mission by Rome until 1982, it suffered from a chronic lack of personnel. In 1985, rather than forming an independent province, mission personnel opted to become a district of the new Chicago Province, which began to slowly increase the footprint of the mission. Today, the Caribbean District has expanded to include Divine Word Missionaries at 12 parishes on nine different islands.
As the Chicago Province, Southern Province, and Western Province celebrate 125 years of work in communities across the continent, from Canada to the West Indies, Massachusetts to California, they also look toward the future. The Divine Word Missionaries in North America continue to focus on the Society’s tenets laid out by St. Arnold Janssen 145 years ago while assisting marginalized communities in need.