This is a busy travel weekend, but people passing through many airports across the country can find a quiet corner to stop and reflect and pray. (No, I’m not talking about Cinnabon or Hudson News.)

Meet the priest who ministers to the flying flock at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport:

In a small room above the crowds of Terminal 2, the Rev. Michael G. Zaniolo prepared to deliver his airport version of Mass.

In other churches it can take an hour or more. But as an American Airlines pilot strode into the chapel with his luggage, Zaniolo was ready to deliver it a bit quicker — 30 minutes or less. His homily, a thoughtful sermon with messages of hope, was whittled to 1 minute, 46 seconds.

“People have to rock and roll,” said Zaniolo, a 50-year-old Catholic priest. “Every second counts.”

For the last nine years, Zaniolo has been hearing confessions and offering Mass to workers and travelers at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. It is a community bigger than most Chicago suburbs. Thirty-nine thousand people work there. Nearly 71 million passengers crossed its concourses last year.

Along a quiet stretch of the mezzanine level, Zaniolo deals with a ministry of the moment: reassuring nervous fliers, praying with anxious workers, helping flight crews whose friends died in plane crashes.

When it comes to flying, Zaniolo said, “there are few atheists in the air.”

O’Hare is one of 32 airports in the U.S. with places set aside for worship, meditation or prayer.

The interfaith chapel, which some call St. O’Hare, was opened in 1960. Protestant ministers hold Sunday services here. Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams meet with families waiting to receive a loved one’s remains.

Between services, the chapel is kept bare of religious iconography. When Catholics come for daily Mass, the priests bring out a silver cross and a golden banner. When Muslims arrive for prayer, the imam pulls out prayer rugs and the Koran.

The mainstay of the chapel is Zaniolo, president of the National Conference of Catholic Airport Chaplains. He and a team of local volunteer priests offer Mass at O’Hare once each weekday, twice on Saturdays and four times on Sundays.

Their chapel is a small room, no bigger than a two-car garage. Rows of brown-cloth chairs sit before a low stage and a pair of flickering oil lamps. A glass wall looks out onto parked planes and luggage carts zooming across the tarmac.

O’Hare has always been a part of Zaniolo’s life. He grew up in northwest Chicago, in the airport’s flight path, and would lie in the grass, watching planes crisscross the sky.

He worked as an electrical engineer for four years, before entering the seminary in 1984. By 1988, he had graduated with a degree in theology and served as an associate pastor on Chicago’s northwest side. After a dozen years of working in different churches, he asked to become O’Hare’s chaplain.

He’d become fascinated by the airport and the people in it after his predecessor led him and a church youth group on a tour.

“I’m thinking, this is a cool job to have: to be a part of people’s lives in the place where they’re working, and to be a significant presence for the travelers,” Zaniolo said.

Now, he makes a walking tour of the airport every day. “If they don’t come to the chapel, it’s up to me to go to them,” said Zaniolo, a short, gray-haired man with a quick wit and a patient attitude. O’Hare is so big it takes him a month to visit every location.

Assaulted by the scent of stale coffee, the priest skirted around the crowds preparing for their flights.

“How’s life, Father Mike?” asked a janitor emptying a trash can. Security guards at the X-ray machine smiled and wished him a good morning. So did a pair of businessmen waiting to have their luggage screened.

Fear of flying rarely comes up in conversation these days. Instead, Zaniolo listens to worries about jobs, the economy and city budget cuts.

There’s much more at the link.