"The stone which the builders rejected, has become the corner stone.
By the LORD has this been done; It is wonderful in our eyes."
Psalm 118:22-23
ST CECILIA PARISH HISTORY
How good it is, how pleasant, where the people dwell as one!
Psalms 133:1
PEOPLE MAKE OUR PARISH
An extraordinary church, its deeply-arched Romanesque doors opening on the comings and goings of busy Livernois Avenue in Detroit; its statue of St. Cecilia - patron saint of music - facing out across the cacophony and traffic noises of her inner-city parish, entered its 80th anniversary in 2001.
Lifting its tower and fine wheel window high above the adjacent community, displaying on the apse dome within its proud painting of the Black Christ, the church of St. Cecilia marked its Golden Jubilee on November 22nd, 1971. The anniversary was planned in the spirit of St. Cecilia's, to serve not as a pause within, but rather as a celebration of its joyful day-to-day work of brotherhood and love.
"THIS IS WHY WE HAVE THE BLACK CHRIST!"
"The stone which the builders rejected, has become the corner stone.
By the LORD has this been done; It is wonderful in our eyes."
Psalm 118:22-23
This
is why we have the Black Christ. We hope to shock people out of their
ignorance of Christ. We hope to teach them whose pain this is in this city
and country of ours. If anybody can walk into our church and say 'My God,
Christ is black! If he can take the next step and say, 'Black poverty is
Christ's; black frustration is 
Christ's,' we will have done what we hoped to
do..." With these words Father Raymond N. Ellis explained to angry
letter writers the meaning of the newly unveiled painting of the Black Christ in
the apse of the church in 1968, and to a somewhat startled public the creative
purposes of St. Cecilia's toward a parish neighborhood at one time both middle
class and white (the childhood parish of former Mayor Jerome Cavanagh) which had
become during the 1960's primarily black. With the creation of the
community called Ceciliaville, whose purpose was to delineate "from the
city of Detroit a small section that would identify itself as a community,"
St. Cecilia's Church, with a membership of no more than two-thousand expressed
in 1968 its intent toward the forty-thousand people within its parish
boundaries. This intention was carried out in the months and years that followed
with an extensive program of sports, skills-training, music, schooling, and
child care, food distribution and adult study which has served as a model to
neighborhood planners across the nation, and prompted the Reverend Paul F. Fettig to comment on the parish with pride which "walked and sang with a
strength of family spirit that undoubtedly is unmatched by any church in the
City of Detroit."
Continued
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