In September 1988, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit, announced via a closed-circuit television broadcast that the archdiocese would close dozens of inner-city parishes in Detroit within a year. Churches on the city’s predominantly Black east side would be disproportionately affected. 

The announcement triggered an immediate outcry: parishioners met at Sacred Heart, Detroit’s Black Catholic “mother church,” and held vigils outside locked churches; the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance became the organizing hub of resistance; protestors marched up and down Woodward Avenue; and a few local residents planted mums outside the cardinal’s residence, one for each parish the archdiocese eventually closed. 

In the second episode of “The City and the Cross,” host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson chronicles the community organizers who coordinated these efforts, a journalist who covered the story, the Catholic priests caught between their vows of obedience and their commitment to Black parishioners, and the prominent Black Catholic leader—a former Black Panther—who had to deliver the news of the parish closures to the communities he faithfully tried to serve.

Featured Voices:

• Walter Hurley, Cardinal Szoka’s chief of staff, who oversaw the implementation of the closures;
• Patricia Montemurri, a Detroit Free Press reporter who covered the Catholic Church in Detroit for decades;
• Father Norm Thomas, the Lebanese American pastor of Sacred Heart Church and a co-founder of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance (DCPA), who became the public face of the fight against the closures (archival);
• Cathey DeSantis, a former nun who became one of the lead organizers of the DCPA;
• Eric Blount, a Sacred Heart parishioner and minister who became an outspoken public voice against the archdiocese’s plan;
• Frances May, a Black laywoman who co-led the Alliance for Detroit Churches and directly challenged Cardinal Szoka’s authority (archival);
• Wyatt Jones III, whose father Wyatt Jones Jr. delivered the news of the closures to the communities he had devoted his life to serving;
• Michelle McKinney and her mother Jackie Mahome, who watched St. Agnes—the church where Jackie had built pioneering Black history programs—be merged out of existence.

The third and final episode of The City and the Cross airs Wednesday, June 24. Click here to listen to episode 1, “From the Ground Up.”

For more information about the series, click here. To learn more about Commonweal’s Centennial Fellowship, click here.