An Island in Society

"I've got a dream parish," says Father Clement H. Kern. "I'm so lucky. Almost every seminarian hopes to get a church like this, but there aren't very many of them left."

Father Kern's dream parish, the Roman Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church, is located in a rundown, ramshackle Detroit slum, where sagging frame houses, tarpaper shacks and old brick duplexes are slowly giving way to warehouses and trucking garages. This is Corktown, once as Irish as its name, and the big white church, which has been in its present location since 1855, still sports a trim of faded Kelly green. But the Irish have moved on and up in the world; Corktown is now made up primarily of Mexicans, Negroes fresh from the South, Puerto Ricans and Maltese.

In the world of fund-raising organizations and church administrators, the conception of the parish church as the beating heart of a community is growing steadily rarer. But Holy Trinity is a relic of the more personal past, preserved by poverty. "We're an island in the affluent society," says Father Kern. "Most people just don't believe there are poor any more. But there are plenty of them. We painted the church and parish house bright white for a reason. The incoming people hear that there's a big white place where they can get help. There is no organization these days like a parish. It's the human way of doing things. These people are afraid of the big agencies. They won't go to the clinics. But they will come to the church for medical help.''

Vitamins for 150. Holy Trinity is a parish of 5,000 souls, but actually ministers to thousands more, at least half of whom are non-Catholic. For almost all of them, the old church is the kind of hearth and headquarters it once was for the immigrant Irish. If pastors in the suburbs have trouble reaching their parishioners, Father Kern and his assistant priests do not. All through his 17-hour day, parishioners surround him, and the commonest phrase he hears is "Tengo una molestia" (I've got trouble).

Unmarried mothers, sneak thieves, streetwalkers and undernourished children are all part of the day's trouble at Trinity. Alcoholics are everywhere--even on the church staff. Joe O'Brien, the doorman, is a retired bartender who knows what it is to lose a weekend in the bottom of a glass. So do Charley Hirst, 51, Father Kern's secretary, and onetime Engineer John McCarthy, who runs the employment agency. Father Kern is an expert at straightening out "whisky priests."

Every Thursday night, as many as 150 alcoholics-on-the-mend line up for their shots of vitamin B12. The nerve-soothing vitamins are paid for partly by the Corktown Guild, whose members are mostly bartenders, and partly by the Corktown Coop, made up of men trying to rehabilitate themselves, who scavenge scrap to raise the money for their injections.

Shakedown. The Corktown Guild and the Co-op are not the only instances of Holy Trinity help and selfhelp. There is a "foot clinic" run by Chiropodist Earl G. Kaplan in his spare time, a dental clinic operated by volunteers from the Detroit Society of Dental Hygienists, a legal clinic manned by top lawyers. There is a Filipino Club, a Puerto Rican Club, a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous (membership: 1,000), a St. Vincent de Paul Society, a credit union that started with $80 in 1947, now has assets of $147,000; there is even a two-night-a-week "Corktown College" (tuition: $1.33 a month), which offers such courses as English, citizenship, Spanish and folk dancing with the slogan "Never too old to learn."

From time to time it has been suggested that a dozen or so of the parish's 25 assorted activities be brought under the jurisdiction of Detroit's prosperous United Foundation, but Father Kern is dead set against it. "It would take away our charm," he explains with a smile. "We've got some pride, too. People help us down here because they want to--we don't recruit. The benefits of giving are somehow lost when it's mechanically deducted."

Holy Trinity operates at a loss of about $300 a week, but much of this deficit is covered by the "Ecclesiastical Shakedown Society," a group founded in 1957 by Earl ("Hank") Shurmur, a Detroit TV cameraman. Hard drinking occasionally led Hank Shurmur to bed down at Holy Trinity, and after Father Kern "straightened him out," Shurmur began putting the bite on high-salaried executives all over the city for contributions. The society shook down $4,200 the first year, has already topped $3,000 so far in 1960. Members send materials and food, as well as money. One member contributed 900 cases of slightly damaged canned goods, and another collected enough money to buy Father Kern a new car (the pastor sent it back, kept his 1955 Ford).

Sins of Weakness. Pastor Kern, 52, is the son of a Pontiac assembly-line worker, a graduate of Sacred Heart Seminary, and a former chaplain in the Catholic Worker movement. He came to Holy Trinity in 1943, was made pastor in 1949. Since he took over, reports Juvenile Court Judge Nathan Kaufman, the area around Holy Trinity Church has had the lowest juvenile delinquency rate of any comparable slum area in the U.S.

"We have many sins of weakness here," says Father Kern. "But I'll bet the Lord will be easier on these people than on folks who say, 'Send them back where they came from.' My biggest problem is to get people to help and love each other. That's what the mystical body of Christ is all about."

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