Archbishop Jeffrey S. Grob presided as Fr. Edward Sanchez was formally installed March 24 as rector of the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, affirming his leadership of the archdiocese’s Mother Church and its downtown mission. (Photo by seansmithphotos.com)
Every day, as he says Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Milwaukee, Fr. Edward Sanchez hears the seagulls.
To many, the cacophonous cry of the birds might be a nuisance. Not to Fr. Sanchez.
To him, it’s a reminder of the mission.
The seagulls, said Fr. Sanchez, make him think of Legolas — yes, that Legolas, the iconic elf of JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” Legolas, after hearing the cry of the seagulls, becomes consumed with a desire for the sea and the Elvish homeland that lies across it.
After he heard the seagulls, he was never the same.
“That’s what we have to do. That’s what we have to awaken in the hearts of the people,” Fr. Sanchez said. “That longing for God.”
It’s been three months since Fr. Sanchez, 35, came to the Cathedral to serve as rector, and just over six months since Archbishop Jeffrey S. Grob asked him to do so. It was an invitation that the priest found intimidating at first.
“I remember my stomach kind of sinking — that’s a big job, a big role,” Fr. Sanchez said.
After praying about it, he came to the conclusion that, as daunting as it may be, the prospect offered him an opportunity to practice radical obedience to the archbishop and his vision for the local Church.
“I realized, look, there’s a reason why the archbishop asked me to do this. The Holy Spirit is guiding the Church and guiding the archbishop,” he said. “It’s not for me to say, ‘I don’t have what it takes to do the job.’ It’s for me to say, like Peter in the Gospel of Luke — ‘At your command, Lord, I will lower the nets.’”
The acceptance became excitement, and Fr. Sanchez hasn’t looked back. On March 24, he was formally installed as the Cathedral’s rector and pastor.
“No one knows more keenly the needs of the Mother Church, the cathedral church of a diocese, than the bishop or archbishop. I also have come to know, from the very earliest of days since being named archbishop, of the qualifications, the abilities of Fr. Edward Sanchez,” said Archbishop Grob in his homily at the installation Mass. “So, knowing both the need of the Mother Church and knowing the qualifications of Fr. Sanchez, it is my pleasure to commend him as the new pastor and rector of this Cathedral church.”
The pastoral needs of the Cathedral community are unique, the archbishop said in the Oct. 2 announcement of Fr. Sanchez’s appointment.
Not only is the historic Cathedral, built in 1847, “a downtown center of social outreach and Catholic witness amid Milwaukee’s civic establishment,” he wrote, in recent years, it has also come to welcome a large Spanish-speaking population.
Prior to Fr. Sanchez’s appointment, Fr. Tim Kitzke served as rector at the Cathedral while also shepherding the Family of Five Parishes on the East Side. Fr. Kitzke and his staff leveraged “considerable skill and resources in recent times to keep the Cathedral viable,” the archbishop wrote — although the need for a full-time, bilingual pastor was becoming clear.
Though Fr. Sanchez was not raised in a bilingual home, his father is from New Mexico and his grandparents spoke Spanish; he studied the language in school and was able to immerse himself in it during different travels to Spain, Guatemala and Mexico, as well as throughout his time as a seminarian at St. Michael and St. Rose parishes in Milwaukee.
Ordained in 2020, Fr. Sanchez assisted in the Hispanic Ministry at his first priestly assignment, Holy Family Parish in Fond du lac, and at St. Katharine Drexel Parish in Beaver Dam, where he served next. He subsequently became the pastor at Immaculate Conception, St. Augustine and Sacred Heart parishes in Bay View, where he served until the end of last year.
Fr. Sanchez estimates that the Cathedral welcomes close to 700 individuals at weekend Masses. They are bankers from the East Side, mechanics from working-class neighborhoods, visitors from all over the world — and he is struck by how they gather, as one, “under the cross, under our faith.”
“They find something here that speaks to all of them. And they discover each other in new ways,” he said.
And just as the seagulls clamoring overhead enter into the chaos of downtown urban life, Fr. Sanchez believes that so, too, must the Church, with all her truth and all her beauty, call forth into the lives of all who see the Cathedral’s iconic tower, pray within its historic walls or find refuge in one of its outreach ministries.
The mission of the Cathedral community has different dimensions, Fr. Sanchez observes. One is the dimension of beauty present in its architecture and its music. Another is the reality of the poor, whom “you will always have with you.” (Matthew 26:11) The Cathedral’s Open Door Cafe operates Sunday through Friday, offering free lunches and fellowship to anyone in need of either — or both.
“They can sit down at these tables, they get to know the volunteers, they get to know the staff, and they experience the same kind of hope that comes from Christ,” said Fr. Sanchez.
The final dimensions, he said, have to do with the faithful’s need for spiritual nourishment, too. “How is the Cathedral going to be a place that people can come to be fed by beauty, to be fed with a free lunch, but also to be fed with the word of God and the teachings of the Lord?” said Fr. Sanchez. “They’ve been waiting for him, they’re looking for him, and that’s kind of our role — to awaken in the city that longing for God. And it includes getting in the messiness of everything. We are here to be a place where they can come and meet God.”
