# The City and the Cross—Episode 3: Dots on a Map

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-commonweal-podcast-1149321/the-city-and-the-cross-episode-3-dots-on-a-map
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-commonweal-podcast-1149321/the-city-and-the-cross-episode-3-dots-on-a-map.md
Podcast: [The Commonweal Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-commonweal-podcast-1149321)
Published: 2026-06-24T15:15:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/SM4155158847.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/SM4155158847.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-commonweal-podcast-1149321/episodes/the-city-and-the-cross-episode-3-dots-on-a-map
Duration seconds: 3388

## Resource

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 Father John McKenzie, a Black priest who tried to serve Detroit’sBlack Catholic community with little institutional support, and whose own 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 very 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 theologian…

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## Transcript

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