Photo: Courtesy of Chicago History Museum/Stephen Deutch

Before Chicago became the “City of Neighborhoods,” many of its denizens sized each other up with one question: “What parish are you from?” With more than 2 million Catholics in town, church membership still defines many communities, from tightly knit black parishes like St. Sabina to the city’s fast-growing Latino congregations. The CHM’s new exhibition captures that sense of community, turning a nostalgic, sometimes adulatory and occasionally critical eye on the history, traditions and institutions that make up Catholic Chicago.

Loaded with proud examples of religious art, ephemera and documentary imagery, the entry wall draws in visitors with a filmstriplike ticker of local scenes—from a vintage St. Rocco parade photo to veiled Chinese-American girls receiving First Communion. Next, visitors encounter footage from the pivotal 1926 Eucharistic Congress, a convention that drew more than a million Catholics to Chicago; across the way, an astounding one-story-tall Our Lady of Guadalupe triptych represents the devotion of the city’s Mexican community.

The love-hate experience of Catholic education is relived, too. While alumni will relish searching the displays for familiar mascots, yearbook photos and other memorabilia, laymen would do best to head right for Catholicism’s greatest secular appeal: the beauty—and at times oddity—of the church’s iconography. Included is Cardinal Mundelein’s gold-embroidered 1930s vestment; stained glass; and an unusual depiction of Mary in pink, with a knitting basket at her side. The final displays touch briefly on the priest sexual-abuse scandal via video interviews, while nearby panels explain the impact of Vatican II and the civil rights movement.

The precious memories and beauty that form the exhibition—the first of an ongoing religion series the CHM has planned—make for a loving hymn sung to a pockmarked institution. At a time when headlines on sexual abuse (and school and church closings) myopically focus on the church’s shortcomings, this glossy portraiture somehow seems a forgivable sin—serving as a reminder of the community and sense of belonging that brought millions of Chicago parishioners to the church in the first place.