National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica

01 / The story of this place

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The Shrine grew out of a small wooden church that Father Charles Coughlin opened in 1926 in Royal Oak, then a mostly Protestant town, and named for the newly canonized St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower. Soon after it opened, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the grounds. Coughlin answered with a microphone. His radio broadcasts, begun in 1926, drew millions of listeners by the 1930s and paid for a monumental stone church, before they turned into angry political sermons laced with antisemitism that got him pushed off the air around the start of World War II. The Charity Crucifixion Tower, a limestone Art Deco tower carrying a huge Christ figure by sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan, was finished in 1931, and Coughlin broadcast from it; the story goes that it was meant as a cross nobody could burn. Architect Henry J. McGill's octagonal church, seating about 3,000, followed in 1936. Coughlin led the parish until he retired in 1966. The US bishops named it a national shrine in 1998, and Pope Francis made it a minor basilica in 2015.

1. Founded by Father Charles Coughlin in 1926, named for St. Therese of Lisieux
2. The Klan burned a cross on the grounds soon after it opened
3. Charity Crucifixion Tower completed in 1931; church completed in 1936
4. Coughlin's radio sermons paid for the building
5. Named a minor basilica by Pope Francis in 2015