Deacon Scott Elliott
The Rev’d Scott Elliott was ordained in February 1998, one of six in the third class of deacons since establishment of the program for the restored diaconate in this diocese. He has served at Church of the Atonement since August 2021, informally at first, then officially assigned to this parish in March 2022.
He was a member of St Peter’s on Belmont beginning in 1984, and served there until 2010. He then went to St Alban’s, a small and mighty parish on the far northwest side of the city, for two years, before moving to St Gregory’s in Deerfield—where he had grown up! He served there until September 2020, and then “lay fallow” until accepting Mother Erika’s invitation to come and hang around here.
This is Scott’s fourth parish and his third pastoral change: he helped St Peter’s make the transition from their long-term rector, James Dunkerley, and again at St Greg’s through the retirement of their long-term rector, Bill Roberts, and the first few years of that of his successor, Anne Jolly. He previously served on the diocesan Antiracism Commission, Deacon Formation committee, and Cursillo Secretariat, and is a member of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests.
Professionally, Scott has always worked in “the helping professions” since he first volunteered at a crisis hotline at the age of seventeen. He has been a youth-service and child-care worker for adolescents, an addiction counselor, and worked briefly at Howard Brown Clinic in the then-new HIV antibody testing program. For 25 years he was a probation officer in the Cook County system, working primarily with people with domestic violence and DUI-related charges. He retired in 2015, and has since been bicycling, powerlifting, and opera- and symphony-going with his beloved spouse, Cynthia Cheski. They live with Thomas and Toby, the Cat Brothers, in Roscoe Village.