|
``Everybody started coming in to church and we just filled that
place up to capacity every time.''
The church was filled to capacity on Sunday, as well, as
Bishop Earl Boyea celebrated the Mass in Spanish.
It’s a different building now, the fourth one that Cristo Rey
has inhabited. When the Rev. Fred Thelen, the pastor
since 1993, went to recognize the founders, he said recognizing
a single group didn’t seem sufficient, but he began by asking
those who had been around since the 1940s and 1950s to stand.
``It’s never come easy for Cristo Rey church to really continue
on as a parish and a community,” Thelen said later.
``We’ve had to overcome a lot of obstacles. It’s really a great
celebration that we’re here, we’re alive.''
The first obstacle was a highway, Interstate 496, which runs
over the spot where the first Cristo Rey once stood.
But the church’s leaders used the demolition as an opportunity.
“We began to see a lot of people coming in who needed help,
food, housing, all kinds of assistance,” Delgado said, “and as a
group we began to talk about having a combination of a church
and a social place for people to come in.”
Which is how Cristo Rey Community Center came to be,
as ably directed by John Roy Castillo, J.D.
The congregation moved to north Lansing—“We put dots on the map
where all of the Spanish-speaking families were, and it really
concentrated around Grand River and High Street,” said the
Rev. Kenneth Faiver, Cristo Rey’s first pastor—and what had
been a church became a hybrid of sorts, a chapel and a social
services center, but also a center of social action and
community development.
Dignarda Calero
and her family were among the thousands of Cubans who fled that
country in the early years of Fidel Castro’s regime.
They arrived in Lansing in 1963.
“We find in Cristo Rey the peace and family we don’t have here
in the United States,” she said.
They also found some of the economic security they’d been
looking for. By 1964, Faiver had helped her husband find a job
at Oldsmobile.
According to a brief history of the parish prepared by The
Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State
University, the hybrid arrangement foundered on
administrative conflicts.
By the mid-1970s, members of the church community were asking
the diocese to re-establish a parish church.
Cristo Rey moved in 1979 to the former Capitol City Baptist
Church on South Washington Avenue.
Though the congregation often had “very few resources
economically speaking. We’ve developed the art of doing a lot
with a little over the years,” Thelen said. The mortgage on that
church was paid off in 1995, and the community began looking for
a larger space to accommodate its thousands of members, moving
to its present location on Miller Road 13 years ago.
If many of the original members were migrant workers who had
dropped out of the migrant stream, it's their children and
grandchildren who attend now.
The church offers services in both Spanish and English.
At the same time, there are new immigrants who, Delgado said,
“kind of revive the faith here at Cristo Rey, and for that we’re
very grateful.”
When Guillermo López arrived in Lansing in 1984, he said
he attended a number of Catholic churches.
``They were nice, it was fine,'' said López, who serves on the
Lansing Board of Education.
“Coming to Cristo Rey it was more like family, a lot of things,
food, language, music. It seemed more like home.”
Information from: Lansing State Journal,
http://www.lansingstatejournal.com
|
