The Royal Oak tower built so a cross couldn't be burned

The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of this church, so the priest built a cross they could never burn down. It still stands on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak: the Charity Crucifixion Tower, a slab of Indiana limestone with a 28-foot figure of Christ carved straight into the stone, finished in 1931. Wood burns. A seven-story carving does not.

The parish was young then — founded in 1926 in a corner of Oakland County that was mostly Protestant — and Father Charles Coughlin was its first pastor. After the cross-burning, he answered with the tower, and he paid for it in one of the strangest ways anyone ever bankrolled a building. Coughlin was among the first radio preachers in America, and at his height he had an audience in the tens of millions. He broadcast from a studio reached by a spiral staircase inside that very tower, and he asked listeners all over the country to mail in small donations. They did, by the sackful.

It is a story the parish tells honestly, including the part it cannot be proud of. Coughlin’s broadcasts curdled over the 1930s into bitter, openly antisemitic politics and praise that flirted with Europe’s fascists, until the Church and the government pushed him off the air for good. The tower he built against one kind of hatred outlived his own slide into another.

The round main church behind it was finished in 1936, an unusual in-the-round design with the altar at the center. The U.S. bishops named the place a national shrine in 1998, and in 2014 Pope Francis raised it to a minor basilica. You need not be Catholic, or believe anything at all, to stop on Woodward and look up at a cross that was carved precisely so no torch could touch it.