"I've got a dream parish," says Father Clement H. Kern. "I'm so lucky. Almost every seminarian hopes to get a church like this, but there aren't very many of them left."
Father Kern's dream parish, the Roman Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church, is located in a rundown, ramshackle Detroit slum, where sagging frame houses, tarpaper shacks and old brick duplexes are slowly giving way to warehouses and trucking garages. This is Corktown, once as Irish as its name, and the big white church, which has been in its present location since 1855, still sports a trim of faded Kelly green. But the Irish have moved on and up in the world; Corktown is now made up primarily of Mexicans, Negroes fresh from the South, Puerto Ricans and Maltese.
In the world of fund-raising organizations and church administrators, the conception of the parish church as the beating heart of a community is growing steadily rarer. But Holy Trinity is a relic of the more personal past, preserved by poverty. "We're an island in the affluent society," says Father Kern. "Most people just don't believe there are poor any more. But there are plenty of them. We painted the church and parish house bright white for a reason. The incoming people hear that there's a big white place where they can get help. There is no organization these days like a parish. It's the human way of doing things. These people are afraid of the big agencies. They won't go to the clinics. But they will come to the church for medical help.''
Vitamins for 150. Holy Trinity is a parish of 5,000 souls, but actually ministers to thousands more, at least half of whom are non-Catholic. For almost all of them, the old church is the kind of hearth and headquarters it once was for the immigrant Irish. If pastors in the suburbs have trouble reaching their parishioners, Father Kern and his assistant priests do not. All through his 17-hour day, parishioners surround him, and the commonest phrase he hears is "Tengo una molestia" (I've got trouble).
Unmarried mothers, sneak thieves, streetwalkers and undernourished children are all part of the day's trouble at Trinity. Alcoholics are everywhere—even on the church staff. Joe O'Brien, the doorman, is a retired bartender who knows what it is to lose a weekend in the bottom of a glass. So do Charley Hirst, 51, Father Kern's secretary, and onetime Engineer John McCarthy, who runs the employment agency. Father Kern is an expert at straightening out "whisky priests."
Every Thursday night, as many as 150 alcoholics-on-the-mend line up for their shots of vitamin B12. The nerve-soothing vitamins are paid for partly by the Corktown Guild, whose members are mostly bartenders, and partly by the Corktown Coop, made up of men trying to rehabilitate themselves, who scavenge scrap to raise the money for their injections.