Religion: An Island in Society

"I've got a dream parish," says Father Clement H. Kern. "I'm so lucky. Almost every seminarian hopes to get a church like this, but there aren't very many of them left."

Father Kern's dream parish, the Roman Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church, is located in a rundown, ramshackle Detroit slum, where sagging frame houses, tarpaper shacks and old brick duplexes are slowly giving way to warehouses and trucking garages. This is Corktown, once as Irish as its name, and the big white church, which has been in its present location since 1855, still...