Podcast: Fr John McKenzie on modern urban Catholic evangelization (BCM show #14)

The Black Catholic Messenger show is back in 2025!

Our first episode of the year is an interview from December with Fr John McKenzie of Detroit, one of the nation’s younger African-American Catholic priests. He serves in solidum with a team of priests who administer five inner-city parishes, including McKenzie’s role at Christ the King Catholic School, one of the last remaining Black Catholic educational institutions in the region.

In his conversation with Nate Tinner-Williams, McKenzie recounts his journey from Missouri to Rome and back again stateside, after years as a Benedictine monk in Italy. In Michigan, he is an advocate for a revival in Black Catholic outreach.

“That is the mission of our school, which, as Sister Thea Bowman said, is how the evangelization of the Black community happened. It was primarily through the Catholic schools,” said McKenzie, noting the successes and challenges seen in recent years with Christ the King, which has served the McNichols Evergreen neighborhood for nearly nine decades.

“I realized how quick we had to make a turnaround for our school and we did it.”

The school, however, is just one aspect of McKenzie’s ministry. Like many Catholic priests, young and old, he is tasked with ministry in a number of parishes in a historic diocese that has seen reduced Mass attendance and giving since the late 20th century.

Schools and parishes have shuttered, especially in the Black Catholic community, and McKenzie sees his mission in part as helping to stem the tide.

“In our Black Catholic urban environment, it ain't just being pastor. It's being fundraiser, [and] it's first and foremost making sure people have basic needs, right?” he said.

“So the time that I wish I had to then actually do the real evangelization, as they want to say, it's time-limited because we're kind of spread thin.”

McKenzie says the current initiatives of the Church at the global level—e.g., Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality—have given signals that the poor and marginalized remain the focus of Catholic outreach at the macro level.

Even so, the local level in America is a different story.

“I believe that the preferential option of the poor, which is what the Church officially teaches, is just as clear as what we believe that Jesus is both God and man. [It] is housed in the Christological faith,” said McKenzie.

“Anything that doesn't see those most in need first at the decision-making table [is] not from God.”

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