DETROIT —
The ethnic and cultural diversity of Most Holy Trinity Parish’s past and present were on display as the Corktown parish celebrated its 175th anniversary as a worshipping community Nov. 7.
Guatemalan musicians played music with a Hispanic flair, but there was also a traditional Irish hymn, and a contingent of students from the parish grade school (mostly African-American or Hispanic) performed Gospel numbers.
Archbishop Allen Vigneron celebrated the anniversary Mass for a congregation of about 1,100, representing current parishioners as well as others with historic family ties to the parish.
The archbishop praised “the unbroken chain of community life” from the days of Fr. Martin Kundig and the pioneer families of the parish in the 1830s all the way through the more recent pastorates of Msgr. Clement Kern, Fr. Jay Samonie and current pastor Fr. Russell Kohler.
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He spoke of Fr. Kundig, Most Holy Trinity’s first priest, as “a great missionary, no question about that, who came to the united States in 1828-29.”
“He was a Swiss Guard, before he left that to become a soldier of the Kingdom of Heaven,” the archbishop continued, referring to Fr. Kundig’s service in the elite Vatican military unit before discerning a vocation to the priesthood.
Archbishop Vigneron said accounts of Fr. Kundig’s work with the sick during the cholera epidemic of the 1830s “give a sense of the great man Fr. Kundig was.”
And he added that, over the parish’s history, “so many priests of so many generations have carried on this tradition.”
Fr. Kohler, pastor since 1991, said later it is humbling to hold the position once held by priests such as Fr. Kundig, Fr. James Savage, who reached out to the Native Americans, and Msgr. Kern, known for his work for the poor and with organized labor.
“You’re always in somebody’s shadow, but the Lord is the source of that light,” he said.
Although it was 1834 when the need for a parish to serve English-speaking Irish-immigrant Catholics was recognized and a former Presbyterian church purchased for the purpose, use of the wooden building on Cadillac Square was diverted to serve as a hospital for a year because of the cholera epidemic.
Only after the epidemic had died down — claiming about 2,000 dead out of a population of less than 10,000 — could the church be used for its intended purpose.
The parish moved to Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, just west of downtown, which was becoming the heart of Irish settlement, and built the present church in 1855.
Fr. Kundig, who ran the hospital, later returned as the parish’s second pastor, after Fr. Bernard O’Cavanagh.
Since its early days, the parish has served successive waves of immigrants — Maltese, Mexicns, Guatemalans — as well as maintaining an outreach to the poor.
“If Kundig were to come back today, I think he would approve,” Fr. Kohler said.
