Word: detroit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...drive to force another referendum on any vetoed restrictions. The issue has split both parties: the staunchly liberal United Auto Workers has taken no position because of bitter dissension within its ranks, while pro- choice sentiment is strong in affluent, suburban and heavily Republican Oakland County, just north of Detroit...
Nowhere are the problems more evident than in Detroit and Washington, two archdioceses where the church is confronting sharp dissatisfaction among blacks. In Washington, a fiery, articulate black priest named George A. Stallings Jr., fed up with the church's treatment of blacks, plans to defy James Cardinal Hickey this week by inaugurating his own independent African- American Catholic Congregation. In Detroit, black resentment is aimed at Edmund Cardinal Szoka, who last week finally shut down 21 of the city's 114 parishes, mostly in black neighborhoods, with nine others soon to follow. The action came despite angry protests...
...Detroit imbroglio, Cardinal Szoka threatens to shut down another 25 parishes by next year unless offerings and memberships increase. Though many white worshipers too are hurt by the retrenchment, the archdiocese's 65,000 black Catholics especially feel that the church is abandoning them. Marian Gabriel, co-chair of a local black Catholic organization, considers Szoka's decision "blatantly racist." Says she: "This is the most disgusting thing I've ever run up against...
...Szoka has written movingly about the church's past failures in ministering to blacks. But the Cardinal felt compelled to take drastic action, in part because of Detroit's ruinous population decline. The city's churches, however, are also dying because they have failed to enlist any significant numbers of blacks when white ethnics began moving out of their neighborhoods. Says the Rev. Norman Thomas, a white priest who opposes the closings: "The church has not done an adequate job of being a church in the city, and that includes attracting blacks...
...defection of Washington's Father George Stallings and devastating parish closings in Detroit expose Catholicism's failings among U.S. blacks...