Fr. Cunningham’s life featured in new book by former Free Press reporter

DETROIT — It’s 1967, and Jack Kresnak and his classmates are sitting in a classroom at Sacred Heart Major Seminary High School, looking at the clock and waiting for their literature teacher to come through the door.

Hope for the City: A Catholic Priest, a Suburban Housewife and their Desperate Effort to Save Detroit

By Jack Kresnak
Cass Community Publishing House (Nov. 16, 2015)
454 pages | $25
Available at ccpublishinghouse.org or amazon.com

Students waiting in anticipation, already having completed their reading assignment, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are ready to discuss the meaning behind the prose of England’s great writer.

Finally, in walks the teacher. He turns off the lights, lights a candle and leads the students in prayer. There was no lecture that day — but Fr. Bill Cunningham still taught a lesson.

So it was for most of Fr. Cunningham’s life; the long-haired, motorcycle-riding Detroit priest was on a mission to save a city, according to Kresnak, author of Hope for the City: A Catholic priest, a Suburban Housewife and their Desperate Effort to save Detroit.

“He challenged and inspired all his students,” Kresnak said. “He taught us all to be in the moment, just sitting in the dark, not taking notes, but really concentrating on words from a recording of Richard Burton reciting the words to Hamlet.”

Fr. Cunningham helped Kresnak kick start his journalism career, and when Fr. Cunningham died May 26, 1997, Kresnak’s old teacher gave him one last assignment, write a book about Focus: HOPE, the organization Fr. Cunningham started to improve the day-to-day lives of Detroiters caught up in the midst of race riots, crime and economic depression.

“I was a little overwhelmed at the start. I was thinking, ‘Where do I start?’” Kresnak told The Michigan Catholic. “My first idea was to find one slice of Fr. Cunningham that I could get my arms around. I didn’t start from the beginning of his life or in 1968 with the founding of Focus: HOPE. I started with the arson that nearly destroyed Focus: HOPE in 1978.”

Kresnak, an award-winning veteran Detroit Free Press reporter, found the police reports about the ’78 fire, discovering Fr. Cunningham was subjected to a lie-detector test to make sure he didn’t burn down the charity to claim insurance money.

“That fire would be the first chapter I wrote — it ended up being Chapter 14 in the book,” Kresnak said. “Who would have a motive to burn the business down? Well, an owner would if they were facing financial trouble. Insurance ended up paying $1,000 for the damage. What I found so amazing was Fr. Cunningham, a man who could exaggerate the truth when he felt it was needed, taking a lie-detector test. But when he embellished, there was a truth in what he saw.”

Fr. Cunningham’s “embellishment” was the focus of his sermons to congregations across the Archdiocese of Detroit, highlighting the social and economic problems that plagued the city of Detroit and caused unrest — a message Kresnak said wasn’t always popular with mostly white parishes in Detroit’s suburbs.

Kresnak hopes the book will be enlightening for people who want to understand the causes of the Detroit riot of ’68 — and the Warren riot of ’67 — and how Fr. Cunningham, through Focus: HOPE, was pushing for the cultural, spiritual revolution necessary to save the city.

“I think Fr. Cunningham felt lay people didn’t understood the causes behind the riots,” Kresnak said. “The race riot in Warren was because a mixed-race couple moved in, and the residents in Warren created a horrible atmosphere for them.

“They were the first project of Focus: HOPE, supporting the family and other people moving into the city. His mission was to confront white racists with their own racism.”



Hope for the City focuses on the life of one man, but entails the history of a city that was rocked by cultural and economic change that most people couldn’t and didn’t want to understand at the time. Kresnak hopes readers will see Detroit’s past in a new light and realize what Fr. Cunningham was trying to do with Focus: HOPE.

“People don’t understand how Detroit got to where it’s at today, so I wanted to explain it through Fr. Cunningham’s life,” Kresnak said. “He wanted to inspire a message of hope when people were fleeing the city. I think it’s a relevant story to this day.” Fr. Cunningham would be disturbed if he saw Detroit today, but he would be happy with the turnaround with the reinvestment in infrastructure, but more importantly the investment in the people of the city.”

Being a tough grader, Kresnak said his former teacher would give the book a “B-.” The book is published by Cass Community Publishing House, with half of the proceeds going to Focus: HOPE.

“Focus: HOPE is Fr. Cunningham’s true legacy, that’s what he wanted to be remembered by,” Kresnak said. “For him, that was the future, the reason he told others not to name streets or buildings after him.

“I still think back to my high school days; he embodied the Holy Spirit for us in the classrooms and the halls of the seminary. He made the spirit move through us, to accomplish more things than we ever thought possible.”