DETROIT – Parishioners young and old said goodbye to St. Christopher’s Catholic Church on Sunday.
The church, which first opened in 1941 and has at the corner of Tireman and Woodmont since 1965, is closing down due to financial constraints and dwindling attendance.
“It’s been, you know, 85 years in this in this neighborhood, we’ve done a lot of good,” Tom Stoltz, who has attended the church for more than 50 years, said. “For me, it’s like watching a loved one die slowly, and there’s nothing you can do.”
“Even though this parish is going to close,” he added, “the heart and soul will go on.”
While still bearing all of the markings of the original St. Christopher, the parish was renamed in 2019 in honor of St. Juan Diego, a Mexican missionary who was the first saint indigenous to the Americas.
Sunday’s mass was held in both English and Spanish.
“It’s a day of sadness and hope,” Msgr. Charles Kosanke, the archdiocese’s regional moderator, said. “Sadness because this church holds so many memories of its congregation for the last 80 years.”
The closure is not related to the larger, two-year effort that’s already underway to evaluate the state’s catholic churches to determine which ones should remain open.
The restructuring process diocese is much more involved and intense, but there are certain churches that can’t wait, and sadly, this is one of them.”
For many of the parishioners, today’s mass was like a homecoming. A group of former students at St. Christopher’s Elementary School got together in the church one last time – many of them had not been to the church since grade school.
“Once you’re here with those memories, you can’t get look at pictures, but you can’t feel the energy anymore,” Dee Dee Kostrzewa, a 1978 St. Christopher’s graduate, said.
While the decision to close the church, the archdiocese does have plans for the St. Juan Diego Parish, which has a second location at the former St. Thomas Aquinas on Evergreen – this was still a difficult day for so many of St. Christopher’s loyal parishioners.
“The church is the gospel, the soul of the people, and we will continue on” Stoltz said. “I think the Lord looked down and I think he’s pleased at what we did here all these years.”