Tag: congregation

Church Takes a Stand Against Sprawl

  • Sunday mass is much emptier than it used to be at St. Josaphat Parish in Detroit. Only a few dozen Catholics attend mass here each Sunday, though there's room for 1200 - many parishioners have moved to newer churches in the suburbs. (Photo by Corbin Sullivan)

When people left inner cities, many things followed. Newer, better schools were built in the suburbs. And strip malls and shopping centers sprang up. But back in cities, stores and restaurants shut down. Schools and churches also closed. Now, the Catholic church is encouraging people to work together to prevent more urban sprawl. Catholic clergy say they don’t want to close perfectly good churches and cathedrals only to build new ones farther and farther out into the suburbs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

When people left inner cities, many things followed. Newer, better schools were built in the
suburbs. And strip malls and shopping centers sprang up. But back in cities, stores and restaurants
shut down. Schools and churches also closed. Now, the Catholic church is encouraging people to
work together to prevent more urban sprawl. Catholic clergy say they don’t want to close perfectly
good churches and cathedrals only to build new ones farther and farther out into the suburbs. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner reports:


Twenty-five years ago, Loraine Krajewski lost nearly everything. She lost her home and she lost
her church. Both were demolished when General Motors built a sprawling auto plant over
Poletown, a Polish-American neighborhood at the border of Detroit. Krajewski says it was the fight
of her life.


“I did things I never thought I would do. I picketed, I mean, in rain and snow. I wrote
letters, I mean, to Congressmen and to our council and everything. And I went to meetings
that would last until one, two o’clock in the morning at times, and I took time off from work
to go downtown to the council meetings.”


Krajewski was mad at the city of Detroit for letting it happen. And she was mad at the Catholic
Church in Detroit for not fighting the project. But not mad enough to leave the church. Krajewski
and others forced out of Poletown found a new parish in the city, called St. Josaphat.


Krajewski headed for the suburbs after Poletown disappeared. But she still returns to the city every
Sunday for Mass at St. Josaphat. It’s a 15-mile trip.


“We decided we are not going to let another Polish church go down the drain. And that’s
why I’ve been coming here. It’s just too bad that we don’t have a larger congregation.”


More parishioners would make Krajewski feel more sure that St. Josaphat would always be here,
that it was safe from closing down. But it’s not safe. Only a few dozen Catholics show up here
anymore for Mass on Sunday. And the church can hold 12-hundred people.


Father Mark Borkowski is the pastor at St. Josaphat. He says people like Krajewski, who are
coming from 10, 15 or 20 miles away, are the only ones keeping his church open. But just barely.


“If we were to live on Sunday collections alone, the parish would not be able to survive. So
with our monthly fundraising dinners, we can survive. But there’s a difference between
surviving and flourishing.”


People left the churches when they left the city for bigger plots of land and better schools. And the
Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit followed its people. Catholics built new churches in the suburbs.
But now, the Archdiocese is rethinking its role in urban sprawl.


Father Ken Kaucheck is on the Detroit Archdiocese urban sprawl committee. He says the church is
concerned about sprawl because it creates social and economic inequities between cities and
suburbs.


“It creates blight. It creates loss, it creates desolation and desecration. And it destroys not
only communities, but therefore, it destroys the lives of people.”


Kaucheck says the main tenet of the church’s anti-sprawl campaign is encouraging local
governments to work together on economic development. He says if communities are not trying to
one up each other to win new development projects, there would be less incentive for companies to
move farther into rural areas.


Kaucheck says the church wants its priests to talk about sprawl in their Sunday sermons. He calls it
“stirring the population” to affect social change.


“It’s government of the people, for the people and by the people. That’s what a democracy
is about. But somebody has to raise the question and you raise the question, faith-based,
through the scriptures. Is this what the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to? No, it doesn’t call
us to sprawl, it calls us to solidarity in community, and to looking at how service of one
another sometimes means dying to myself, that means maybe I’m going to have to give
something up.”


It isn’t likely the church’s urban sprawl committee will be able do much to bring people back to
parishes in the city. Father Mark Borkowski at St. Josaphat prays about the problem to the
Madonna. Her picture is at the center of the church’s main altar.


“My personal reason for the novena is to say to the Blessed Virgin Mary, ‘I haven’t got a
clue as to what to do, so I’m turning the problem over to you. This is your shrine, if you
want to stay here Mary, do something to help us help you stay, and help us stay here. When
the problem is too big you have to turn it over to a higher power.'”


The Catholic Church now hopes to protect churches that could become the next victims of sprawl.
Those are in places that once served the early waves of Catholics leaving Detroit for the first
suburbs.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

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Volunteers Tally Migrating Cranes

  • The Phyllis Haehnle Memorial Sanctuary in southeast Michigan is home to thousands of migrating Sandhill Cranes each fall. (Photo by Mark Brush)

The colder weather and shorter days are keeping most of us inside. But for a group of volunteers it’s the perfect time to head outdoors. They’re putting on their gloves and setting up their spotting scopes to go out and watch one of their favorite birds get ready for the long trip south. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports these birds gather by the thousands before migrating:

Transcript

The colder weather and shorter days are keeping most of us inside. But
for a group of volunteers it’s the perfect time to head outdoors. They’re
putting on their gloves and setting up their spotting scopes to go out and
watch one of their favorite birds get ready for the long trip south. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports these birds gather by
the thousands before migrating:


(Sound of cranes)


It’s a dreary and damp evening next to this marsh in rural southeast
Michigan.
The dampness has that edge of cold to it that’s hard to escape.
And while most people are heading to their warm homes for the day –
things here at the Haehnle Bird Sanctuary are just getting started as
volunteers count cranes:


(sound of cranes flying overhead and volunteers)


“I got a whole line of coming in over the flats out there – oh, man – It’s
startin’… how many?”


“Thirty-four.” (sound of clicks)


With the help of a clicker, three volunteers from the Audubon Society
count the birds.
Fortunately for them, the birds they’re counting are… really big.
The Greater Sandhill Crane is one of the biggest birds in the region.
They glide into the sanctuary by the thousands with their gangly legs
dangling behind them.
They’re counting the birds for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
This is part of a wider effort in the region to get an overall count of the
crane population.
They have one night to count – and tonight’s the night.


Gary Siegrist is one of the volunteers. He says the birds come into this
wetland after a day feasting in the farm fields:


“They’ve been out feeding all day… and they stage… this is one of two
places in southern Michigan where they stage. And when they get to a
point where they have enough fuel in their bodies enough fat built up, and
their food supplies are gone, and maybe the mud lake is frozen over, then
they’ll find a favorable wind and head south.”


The gathering is an instinct for these birds. During the summer months
they spread out across the region in pairs. But when it’s time to migrate
they get together in big flocks before they head to Florida. And when they
gather in large numbers – it can get noisy.


Gary Siegrist says the bird’s call is one of the things that draws him here
to count the birds year after year:


“People don’t realize that it’s the oldest living bird species. They’ve got a
relative that goes back 35 or 65 million years – it’s the time of the
dinosaurs…the bird is fantastic and if you can hear the call, you
can hear it in the background, it kind of sends shivers down your back. It
reminds you of a different time.”


(sound of cranes flying by)


The volunteers also spend their time chatting with people who visit the
Sanctuary. And even on a cold night like tonight – people have come out
to see the birds.


Phil DeLang drove with his wife and grandson two and a half hours just to
watch the gathering… and they do it every year:


“I think all of nature is precious, I me an it’s really precious when you
think of things becoming extinct, like the passenger pigeon, what a
tragedy, it never should have happened. I’m just glad there’s places like
this. People have taken the effort to give these birds a home.”


(sound of counting)


The birds continue to arrive by the hundreds as the sun begins to set. As
darkness falls – the volunteers tally up their final number:


“Twenty nine seventy five. Tweny-nine seventy five? Yeah. O.k.”


The count for the evening is over. And by their calculation nearly 3000
birds are settling down for the night.


(3 seconds of sound at night)


The volunteers head home to double check their math – and send in their
final numbers.


(bring up morning birds)


The next morning at the sanctuary the birds are waking up and heading
into the farm fields.


We caught up with Ron Hoffman here. He’s the guy who coordinates the
official crane count for this region. And between all the volunteers that
counted last night – they spotted 4,600 cranes.
Ron has been studying these birds since the 1960’s when they were just
coming off the threatened species list. And he’s seen the bird’s population
grow steadily over the years.


But Ron Hoffman and the other volunteers see a pattern developing in this
area – a pattern that could threaten the number of cranes that use this
sanctuary. The Haehnle sanctuary is surrounded by spreading housing
developments. They fear these developments would use up farmland,
which is important to the birds:


“I’m sure we’ll always have cranes, but at the same time if this area within
ten fifteen miles of hear is so built up that there’s not the food reserves
here for the cranes to feed, then the number of cranes using this would be
diminished.”


But no matter how many cranes are out here, you can bet Ron Hoffman
and the other volunteers will be counting them year after year.
They care about these birds.


While we were talking, he interrupted to watch a young bird fly by:


“This guy is really lost – look he’s coming back over.” (sound of little
bird) Did you see him craning his neck and looking? He’s trying to find
his parents…”


Hoffman says his biggest hope for the Greater Sandhill Crane is that the
population will remain stable, so that he and others can continue to
experience what he calls one of the wildlife spectaculars in this region.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.


(sound of cranes)

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Nuns Drive Toward Greener Lifestyle

For many people, the meaning of spirituality comes from revering a higher power. But in northern Ohio, there’s a group of nuns working to make spirituality a little more grounded. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Renita Jablonski introduces us to the woman who helped start it all:

Transcript

For many people, the meaning of spirituality comes from revering a higher
power. But in northern Ohio, there’s a group of nuns working to make
spirituality a little more grounded. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Renita Jablonski introduces us to the woman who helped start it all:


Sister Mary Shrader drives to work every day in a Honda Civic. It runs
on natural gas. When she pulls into the campus of the Sisters of St.
Joseph, she parks right in front of two compressed natural gas fueling pumps. With a flip of her gray hair, she gets ready to refuel.


“This is very easy and it’s very convenient to come in to work, plug your car in, and when you come out, it’s all filled. (sound of plug being put into car) In a few seconds, the compressor will kick in.”

(sound of compressor)


The Sisters of St. Joseph have 12 CNG cars so far. They’re members of the Northeast Ohio Clean Fuels Coalition. The addition of alternative fuel vehicles to their fleet was one of Shrader’s first projects when she was elected to
the congregation’s leadership council five years ago. That’s when the sisters
first adopted a resolution to pursue unity with the earth.


Shrader entered the convent when she was 17. It was 1960. She says back then, the congregation’s teachings often considered the natural world separate from the spiritual world.


“But they are, they’re totally integrated and the respect that you get from
your spirituality flows into the earth entities and Earth gives us the awe and the inspiration.”


Before coming to the Cleveland diocese, Shrader worked in Alaska in the Diocese
of Fairbanks. It’s when she first started to realize that environmental work was
her true calling.


“I’ve always wanted to live in the country, I’ve always wanted to be with animals and well, I got there and it was not exactly as I had envisioned it because much of the
economy of the state is run on oil business and on military and on tourism.”


Before she knew it, Shrader found herself joining an environmental group,
doing work opposing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As an
English teacher, she made it a point to teach Thoreau’s Walden to get her students to think about their relationship with nature. And now, she’s leading her sisters in Cleveland on a very green path. Shrader’s latest project is a wind power study.


Last week, Green Energy Ohio installed a 130-foot wind energy-monitoring tower on the congregation grounds.


“We have done an energy audit so that we can lower the amount of energy that we use, and use it more efficiently.


They’ve also met with a consultant to evaluate every product used on site to make sure everything’s earth-friendly. Shrader is trying to integrate this environmental ethic into the sisters’ daily lives.


“I would hope we would be able to complete the educational program that we’ve
begun for residents and staff here so that they understand that this is a part of everything we do here. So no matter what area they work in, the kitchen,
maintenance, secretarial staff, health care, the priority of earth-friendly
should be a part of the decision making, the choices, and the actions that are here.”


Shrader is working with other community and religious organizations to promote
environmental awareness. The sisters are also busy reshaping their campus to become a nature trail system with special wildlife areas.


(sound of birds)


They’ve already applied to be an official bird sanctuary.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Renita Jablonski.


(natural sound fades out)