Detroit —The city of Detroit is wading into the largest municipal bankruptcy in the country’s history, but for those on the ground, things have felt bankrupt for many years, says the pastor of one city parish.“It’s a low-grade depression that I walk around with and others that I see. Just this cloud of disinvestment that started happening long before the ’67 riots,” said Fr. Robert Scullin, SJ, pastor of Gesu Parish on city’s northwest side and a native Detroiter. “There was a constant movement of business out of the city of Detroit since after the second World War. It wasn’t just after 1967 and the uprisings. There’s been a gradual erosion of economic resources. This is not a new problem, but we haven’t known the magnitude of the indebtedness until now, and that’s just staggering.”
Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy July 18, is more than $18 billion in debt. And as the city works through its liabilities in bankruptcy court, many of its 21,000 retirees are on edge over what will become of their pensions and retirement income.
“There’s great concern,” said Fr. Scullin. “We have a number of people in our parish who work for the city and who are on pensions. They’re looking at losing income right now.”
Fr. Scullin said the mortgage crisis has already forced many people out of their homes, even in what’s considered the more middle-class neighborhoods of northwest Detroit, where Gesu resides.
“There’s a lot more challenged areas like Brightmoor on the west side, or parts of the near east side, so in a way the fact that we saw some negative impact from the mortgage crisis was remarkable. If we’re feeling it, Lord have mercy, what are other areas of the city feeling?” he said.
While the influx of young millennials to the city’s downtown core is an encouraging sign, it doesn’t begin to address the city’s population and tax-base problems, Fr. Scullin said, which have been decades in the making.
“You can’t get a loft downtown anymore, it’s such a popular location,” he said. “But that’s such a tiny percentage of the population of Detroit. You just put an asterisk and a bracket around that growth element.”
Churches in the city of Detroit have seen an uptick in social and human service demands since long before the bankruptcy filing, but Fr. Scullin believes spiritual support is equally needed. The Catholic Church, even in the midst of restructuring its parishes and services through Together in Faith, can continue to offer both corporal and spiritual works of mercy for the city, he said, including through its schools, outreach ministries and evangelization efforts.
“There’s been a lot of creative work between the parishes, collaboration on all kinds of events — both on celebrations, confirmations, support of St. Christine’s Soup Kitchen shepherded by Christ the King Parish — there’s a lot of life and vitality in the people of the parish even in the midst of this economic meltdown,” Fr. Scullin said. “That’s the secret that’s not getting out there.”
“We’re saying, ‘We’ve got a good thing here.’ We’ve got a faith community here that worships well, that serves well, that does things together well, that knows we have to work together or we’ll sink individually. That message is getting to people right now, at least I hope it is. There’s a lot of grace at work in this very hard time.”
Fr. Scullin said prayer is vital to the Church’s ministry to Detroit’s destitute and desperate, but that equally as important was a prayer that urges action on the part of those with the power to help, whether through donations, service or encouragement.
“People have lived with this cloud for so long, and now it’s a storm cloud,” Fr. Scullin said. “They’ve been somewhat emotionally wounded, disabled, depressed. So part of the mission of our Church as a prophetic Church — following Jesus as priest, prophet and king — is to cry out. I always cite Jeremiah 29: ‘Pray for the welfare of the city, for upon its welfare, your wellbeing depends.’”
