From the St. Celestine Church Website

It must have been the workings of Divine Providence that prompted Cardinal Mundelein to foresee the need for a parish out here on the very city limits and beyond. Only a bishop of stout heart and unshakeable faith in the Almighty would have dared to attempt a new parish in 1929, the very first year of the nation’s greatest Depression. Like our patron saint, Celestine, who sent St. Patrick to Ireland, Cardinal Mundelein made a most happy choice. He entrusted the cares and the labors of the prospective parish to a gentle, yet most industrious priest, Father Francis T. Shea.

If anyone ever started from a patch of dirt, it was he. Gathering together the early pioneers, Father Shea and his helpers literally plowed the fields, and leveled the ground. While holding Mass in parishioner basements, at “open-air” parish missions and at the new John Mills School, they hammered the early framework of the modest structures that, on September 26, 1930 was formally established as St. Celestine Parish. The “only miniature parish church in America” as it was situated in the basement of a bungalow located at 3001 North 76th Court and it soon became the building of the frame church, which served as our humble House of God for nearly a quarter of a century. Additions, extensions and consolidations were resorted to as the years passed and the parish grew in numbers and requirements.