As the Chicago Bears entered the playoffs, reminiscences of the 1985 team that won Super Bowl XX swirled around the city.
While most people know of the team from afar, Father Tom Rzepiela met many of the legendary players when he celebrated Mass for them on game day mornings during that historic season.
Rzepiela, 79, now follows his favorite football team as a resident of the Little Sisters of the Poor’s St. Joseph Home for the Elderly in Palatine. When the Bears are playing, he gathers a group of about 15 residents in a room off of the cafeteria to watch the games on an 80-inch TV.
The Bears are never far from his heart, or his body; there’s a Bears logo taped to the back of his wheelchair headrest, and he wears a Bears watch that he’s had for over 40 years. On game days, he also wears his personalized jersey with 72 on the front for 1972, the year he was ordained, and “Father Tom” on the back.
His time saying Mass and serving as a chaplain for the team happened, “kind of by accident,” Rzepiela said.
At the time, he was teaching at Mundelein Seminary while celebrating Mass at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish in Arlington Heights on the weekends. He received an urgent call one day from a priest asking if he could fill in for him saying Mass for the team at the hotel where they stayed on game day mornings.
Mass was held at 7:30 a.m. for players and staff and was followed by a Protestant service at 8 a.m.
“Mike Ditka was the coach and he was always at the Mass. Afterward he would always go to the Protestant one too,” Rzepiela said. “I filled in that time and did it many more times for a year or two.”
As a lifelong Bears fan — his family has had season tickets for over four decades — that call could not have come to a more faithful priest supporter.
“I met all of them. The best player was Walter Payton, who was not Catholic, but he would always come up to me and shake my hand. ‘Hi, Father. How are you?’” the priest recalled. “Just very outgoing and cordial. A real gentleman.”
Rzepiela was able to stay for breakfast with the team after Mass.
“The amount of food these guys eat for breakfast on game day is unbelievable,” he said. “That’s the number one surprise I remember.”
The priest was only able to say Mass for the team for a few years because he then became pastor of St. Thomas of Villanova Parish in Palatine.
Some of Rzepiela’s early memories of cheering for the team are of attending Bears’ games with his dad at Wrigley Field when was he was in elementary school.
His father had tickets to every game because he worked for Riddell, the company that made the helmets. After home games, Rzepiela’s father would go to the locker room and pickup any helmets that were damaged during play and take them back to Riddell to be repaired.
He remembers standing outside the locker room waiting for his dad and all of the fans crowded around. When his dad came out with the helmets the people mistook him for a member of the team.
“When he’d come walking out, he got mauled by kids and fans who thought he was a football player. I just laughed all of the time,” Rzepiela said.
His father worked for Riddell for 54 years, and aunts and uncles did too. He and his brother worked there a few summers.
As a resident of St. Joseph’s Home, he still spreads the Bears spirit.
When the mother general of the Little Sisters of the Poor traveled from France for her first visit to the United States to visit her community’s St. Joseph’s Home for the Elderly in Palatine on Nov. 30, 2021, he presented her with a signed game ball.