Between them, Father George Kane and Bishop John Gorman have spent nearly 145 years in ordained ministry.

Kane, the longest tenured of Chicago’s archdiocesan priests, was ordained in 1951 and has served as an assistant and associate pastor, an Air Force chaplain, a spiritual director at University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, and founding pastor of Church of the Holy Spirit in Schaumburg. Born in January 1926, he is about a month younger than Bishop Gorman, who was ordained in 1952 and is now the oldest archdiocesan priest.

Both men are 98.

Bishop Gorman has served as an assistant pastor, faculty member at Quigley Preparatory Seminary and Niles College Seminary, rector/president of USML/Mundelein Seminary, pastor of St. Michael Parish in Orland Park, and, as an auxiliary bishop, episcopal vicar for Vicariate I, including Lake County and the northwest suburbs; Vicariate V, which took in a large swath of the Southwest Side and southwest suburbs, and vicar for regional services/vicar general.

In addition to his licentiate in sacred theology, Bishop Gorman also earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Loyola University Chicago.

After all his years in ministry, Bishop Gorman said, he has learned that the most important thing is relationships, especially relationships in the context of faith.

“It’s living with and for the people that you serve,” he said. “You watch the faith grow in them and then their families and their children, and you see how faith developed in them.”

He considers himself fortunate in the relationships he had in his family as a child, he said, and in seeing the faith of the Christian Brothers at Leo High School, which he attended before he went to Quigley Preparatory Seminary.

He especially appreciated the opportunity to share his life of prayer and his faith with students in the archdiocesan seminary system, he said.

Bishop Gorman became rector of the seminary in 1965, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, and transformed the program during his eight years there from one that he described as “distant,” with students kept as separate as possible from the outside world, to one that included having seminarians visit and serve in parishes.

“They were being trained to serve,” he recalled. “We were heavily criticized at the time, but that was the life they were going to live.”

Bishop Gorman brought Kane to Mundelein to serve as a spiritual director. Kane recalled that Bishop Gorman at the time often spoke of “responsible freedom.”

“I always liked that,” Kane said. “It was giving the students more freedom, but they had to be responsible with it.”

Kane said that when he was first ordained and sent to Holy Rosary Parish on the far South Side as an assistant pastor, he was “bored to death.”

The parish was run well and efficiently, and he had no complaints about the pastor or other priests. He just felt superfluous.

“I was disappointed,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to do.”

After two years, he moved to Holy Cross on 65th Street, a largely Black parish, where he felt more needed. The school was full, and many of the children were not Catholic. The pastor asked that at least one parent in non-Catholic families take instruction in the Catholic faith, after which they could decide whether to enter the church.

“The biggest thing there was introducing people to the Catholic Church from different denominations,” Kane said. “It was a constant run of instruction classes. … We didn’t have the sense of listening, so we talked too much, but a lot of people found a meaning in the Catholic vision.”

After six years there, he served as an Air Force chaplain for four years.

After his time at Mundelein Seminary, in 1972 Kane was asked to start Church of the Holy Spirit, now part of St. Gregory of Nyssa Parish, which merged Holy Spirit and St. Marcelline.

That became the highlight of his ministry.

“I was hoping that we would get away from this ultra-authoritarian mode that the church had, and get into the way of Vatican II,” he said. “That struck me as a life-giving kind of a vision, and it correlated with the best that I had in my seminary training.”

“People need to pray, there’s no question of that, and they need piety, but they also need to understand the depth of our religion and our faith,” he continued. “They have to understand the mission of our church. And the people responded to it. … Piety is not enough. I just don’t think that’s the way. I don’t think that’s the way of our Lord. He was a doer and a teacher.”

Kane was pastor of the Church of the Holy Spirit for 24 years, until he retired, and he continued to assist there and at Holy Family Parish in Inverness for years as a senior priest.

When he looks back, he said, he appreciates the people he worked with: sisters and priests, but also lay staff and volunteers.

“I couldn’t have done it without them,” he said.

Bishop Gorman said the biggest change he has seen since he was ordained has been the increased role of the laity.

“It’s the authority that the laity have begun to realize about themselves as they came to understand their own baptism,” he said. “A good portion of the laity were eager to become involved.”