With restoration efforts complete, the large crucifix given in 1912 by John Emmanuel Verbiest to Our Lady of Sorrows (Belgian) Church in Detroit will be installed Saturday, Oct. 22, at St. Margaret of Scotland Church in St. Clair Shores.
Fr. Ronald DeHondt, St. Margaret’s pastor, will celebrate a 4 p.m. Mass and re-dedicate the crucifix.
Mary Lou Schulte, a great-granddaughter of the donor, enquired about what had become of the 13-foot by 7-foot crucifix and then rallied other Verbiest descendants to fund the effort to restore it so it can once again hang in a church and serve as a memento of the now-closed parish that was once spiritual home to Detroit’s Belgian-American community.
The crucifix had survived the April 1963 fire that destroyed the old Our Lady of Sorrows Church on Meldrum Street.
“A Capuchin priest was saying Mass that day, and one of the Dominican nuns from the school rushed in to say that the Briggs plant behind the church was on fire, and the high winds were driving the flames toward the church,” Schulte recounts.
The priest gathered up the Eucharist and got out OK, but the crucifix remained to be found — relatively unscathed — by firefighters amid the charred rubble of the church. They carried the crucifix across the street to the rectory, where it remained until the parish was able to build a new church.
But as more and more Belgian-Americans moved to the Macomb County suburbs and elsewhere, the parish’s membership continued to dwindle until it finally merged with Annunciation Parish on Parkview just off Jefferson in 2000, and the Our Lady of Sorrows Church was sold to a Baptist congregation.
Baptists not typically being ones for large crucifixes, the Verbiest crucifix was moved to the renamed Annunciation/Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, which became Good Shepherd Parish when St. Anthony Parish was merged with it in 2006.
That’s where Schulte found it. It had hung in the church for a time, but was eventually taken down as its condition worsened, she was told.
“I went there in March, and it was very, very cold inside the church, but Judy Willis was very helpful and showed me where it was stored, laying on the floor behind the altar covered with a sheet,” Schulte recalls.
The cross itself, made of fir, was still in pretty good shape, but the corpus, which is of plaster, was much deteriorated, she says.
“But I could see that it could be repaired, and I got to working on enlisting support from other Verbiest descendants and others in the Belgian community. Good Shepherd’s pastor, Fr. Michael Nkachukwu, was very gracious about entrusting it to our custody,” Schulte continues.
She invited Fr. Robert Blondell, her former pastor at St. Hubert Parish, Harrison Township, to celebrate Mass for the family and other members of the Belgian community to mark the ceremonial removal of the crucifix from Good Shepherd Parish on July 9. Recalling its original rescue back in 1963, she was able to get off-duty firefighters to carry it out of the church and into the truck that would take it to the studio of Mark Gervaise, a restoration specialist associated with the Detroit Institute of Arts.
She says Gervaise repaired the crucifix, but did not try to make it look brand new. “We want it to look like it’s a hundred years old, but with no scars,” Schulte explains.
Then there was the question of finding a new home for the crucifix, preferably where many Belgian-Americans could see it. She thought of Fr. DeHondt. Schulte knows him because Fr. DeHondt is one of the chaplains who comes to Pine Ridge of Garfield, a Clinton Township senior community where she is chapel coordinator.
Fr. DeHondt, who is of Belgian descent himself, says St. Margaret does have a number of Belgian-American families, and Belgians have played an important role in the history of Detroit and the archdiocese.
“At one time, in the late 1800s, a majority of the priests were Belgians,” he says.
St. Margaret of Scotland Church is at 21201 Thirteen Mile Road in St. Clair Shores, telephone (586) 293-2240.
