Detroit, Mich., Jul 10, 2011 / 16:52 pm
A 100 year-old crucifix pulled from a devastating Detroit parish fire in the 1960s is being restored and sent to a new church home in Michigan.
“It's life size,” said Alton James from Detroit's Good Shepherd parish, where the 13-foot crucifix has been kept safe over the decades.
The cross was the only surviving artifact from a fire – believed but never proved to be set by arsonists – that destroyed Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church on the city's east side in 1963. Though no one was killed in the disaster, it grieved Detroit's Belgian Catholic community, which had been attending the parish since its establishment in 1884.
Parish member and 19th-century Belgian immigrant Joannes Emmanuel Verbiest donated the cross, which is made out of fir and a 5-foot plaster corpus, to his church in 1911.