Following the 1989 parish closures, the infrastructure that had supported Black Catholic leadership in Detroit was largely dismantled. Surviving parishes tried to rebuild community, while parishes that were merged struggled to forge new identities. Meanwhile, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop who oversaw the closures, left the city for Rome to take a top Vatican finance post.
In the third and final episode of “The City and the Cross,” host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson weighs the total cost of the 1989 parish closures—not just the loss of buildings, but the erosion of the systems that once nurtured Black Catholic vocations. He tells the story of Fr. John McKenzie, a Black priest who tried to serve Detroit’s Black Catholic community with little institutional support, and whose struggle raises a pointed question for the Church today: Decades after 1989, how committed is the archdiocese to investing in Black Catholic communities?
Slowly, another question also starts to emerge: Did the Black Catholic Movement ultimately succeed, or did it fail? Robertson asks the people who lived through it.
Today, as the Detroit archdiocese undergoes another round of restructuring, Black Catholics are bracing for the worst, but they refuse to walk away from the spiritual centers they built and still call home.
Featured Voices
- Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow, a musician who helped bring Black musical styles into Catholic Mass;
- Norah Duncan IV, a nationally acclaimed composer who watched the 1989 closures unfold from inside the archdiocesan chancery;
- Judith McNeeley, the daughter of Deacon Allen McNeeley, who was a member of St. Bernard parish until its 1989 closure;
- Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, a former nun from Detroit, now one of the world’s leading Catholic theologians;
- Fr. Tom Lumpkin, a founding member of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance (DCPA);
- Fr. Norm Thomas, the longtime pastor of Sacred Heart and a cofounder of the DCPA who led the public resistance to the 1989 closures (archival);
- Fr. John McKenzie, a Black former Benedictine monk ordained a priest in Detroit in 2019, whose path eventually led him out of the Roman Catholic Church;
- Bishop Walter Hurley, Cardinal Edmund Szoka’s chief of staff;
- Cathey DeSantis, a nun and member of Sacred Heart who became an organizer and eventually director of the DCPA;
- Steve Wasko, a Secular Franciscan and member of a Detroit-area antiracism coalition that formed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder;
- Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, a historian of Black Catholicism whose scholarship frames Detroit as the radical center of the national Black Catholic Movement;
- and Patricia Montemurri, a former Detroit Free Press reporter who chronicled the 1989 closures and broke the news of Szoka’s Vatican appointment.
Click here to listen to episode 1, “From the Ground Up,” and here to listen to episode 2, “A Padlock on All the Doors.”
To learn more about Commonweal’s Centennial Fellowship, click here.