For 118 years, parishioners of St. Donatus in Blue Island have spent a weekend in August baking and cooking, playing and praying and lifting up the saint — as well as the parish named for him.

This year’s St. Donatus Feast and Carnival was held Aug. 9-13, with attractions including carnival rides and games, live music, a beer garden and the same homemade food that the parish has served for at least 60 or 70 years.

“We have no vendors,” said Fred Bilotto, who has led the organizing committee for four or five years and has volunteered since he was a child, brought along by his grandparents. “Everything is homemade.”

The menu includes pan pizza, dough made fresh every morning and baked in the pizza oven that was installed in the church basement decades ago; beef and sausage sandwiches; fresh clams; Italian ice, gelato and fried dough. More recent additions to the menu include tacos and elotes, also homemade.

The oven turns out pizzas about two dozen at a time, he said, and over the five days of the carnival, about 5,000 pizzas will be sold, said Bilotto, who also serves as mayor of Blue Island and is an administrator in Thornwood High School District 205.

“No one does that,” he said. “No one that’s not a restaurant.”

Mirta Berrini has run the kitchen for the past six years, ordering food and organizing the kitchen and the volunteers who are needed to keep everything moving.

Her husband of 43 years, Enzo, makes the dough for the pizza and the fried dough. The two met at the St. Donatus Carnival, Mirta said, and they come back to work every year, even though they moved out of Blue Island 30 years ago.

“St. Donatus is a healing saint, a miracle saint,” Berrini said. “Everyone who is here is praying for something, for some miracle or blessing.”

It is like, she said, every pizza is a prayer.

St. Donatus, she explained, was the patron of the town of Ripacandida, in the Potenza province of southern Italy. Nearly all the Italian families that started St. Donatus Parish came from there, and they continued to celebrate his Aug. 7 feast in Blue Island.

Events this year started with a rosary novena leading up to Aug. 8, the night before the carnival opened. That evening, the pastor, Rogationist Father RG Cagbabanua celebrated a special Mass and blessed all the volunteers, and then blessed the carnival grounds.

On Sunday, the last day of the carnival, the parish has its Feast Day Mass and then parishioners carry the statue of St. Donatus through the streets.

Throughout the carnival, the parish welcomes people from all over Blue Island and the surrounding area, said Laura Mastantuono, another member of the organizing committee. This year, Mastantuono ran beef sandwich and fried dough booths.

“It’s more of a community event,” she said. “It’s not really an Italian event or a parish event or a Hispanic event.”

Former parishioners fly in from around the country, and no matter how fast the oven can produce pizzas, there’s always a line for it, with neighbors and friends chatting and catching up while they wait.

The carnival is the parish’s biggest fundraiser, Bilotta said, taking in tens of thousands of dollars. The biggest variable in how well it does is the weather.

“Not too hot, and no rain,” he said. “We can take one rain day, but two cuts into the profits.”

No parish could start this kind of celebration now, even if it wanted to, Bilotta said. The pizza ovens were donated more than 60 years ago, and the parish also has four walk-in coolers to store food. The cost of that equipment alone would be prohibitive, he said.

Some version of the feast day celebration has been held every year, he said, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the parish sold single servings of food but did have the rides, games and other events.

“We came right back with the full event the next year,” he said, adding that the crowds have been, if anything, bigger since 2021. The more difficult problem is making sure there are enough volunteers to run everything.

“More and more people want to come to it, but less and less people want to work,” Bilotto said. In the past, he said, whole families would volunteer together, and working adults would take vacation time to be at the festival. They would bring their kids, who would grow up volunteering at the carnival.

“When I was a kid, because grandparents were there, I was there,” he said “There’s less and less of that. … Every year, we hope we can make another year out of it.”

That sentiment of uncertainty, he said, has been around since the 95th celebration, 23 years ago.

For her part, Mastantuono is hopeful. She left Blue Island as a young adult and has moved back, and she said more people are doing the same thing.

“Our community is really special,” she said. “I talk to people all the time, and they say what a great childhood they had in Blue Island.”

The carnival has survived because of that sense of community, said Mastanuono, who is half Italian and half Mexican.

“Now the old Italian ladies are in the basement making pizza with help from the Hispanic members,” she said. “Young people and old people working together. It’s paying tribute to our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.”