Sainte Anne de Détroit: Three Centuries of the Oldest Parish
Near Detroit, Michigan
On the west side of Detroit, a few blocks from the river and the Ambassador Bridge, stands a church that has been here almost as long as the city itself, and in one form or another, longer than any other continuously operating Catholic parish in the United States except one.
On July twenty-fourth, seventeen oh one, the French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac landed on the north bank of the Detroit River with a company of fifty artisans, fifty soldiers, and two priests. They had come to establish Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, a strategic outpost meant to anchor French control of the Great Lakes. Two days later, on July twenty-sixth, the feast day of Sainte Anne, mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus, patron saint of New France, they dedicated a small log chapel in her honor.
That chapel was the beginning of what is now the Basilica of Sainte Anne de Détroit. The earliest parish records were destroyed in a fire, but records have been maintained continuously since seventeen oh four, making Ste. Anne de Detroit the second oldest continuously operating Catholic parish in the United States.
The city grew up around it, changed nationality twice, French to British in seventeen sixty, British to American in seventeen ninety-six, but the parish endured. The current building dates to eighteen eighty-six, a Gothic Revival structure of brick and limestone with twin towers visible from the river. It was saved from demolition in the late nineteen sixties when urban renewal threatened the surrounding neighborhood, and in twenty twenty, Pope Francis designated it a minor basilica, one of only three in all of Michigan.
The church still holds services. Its cemetery contains the graves of French settlers from the seventeen hundreds. In a city that has lost so much of its built history, Sainte Anne is a rare thread stretching back to the very moment Detroit began.
