National Shrine of the Little Flower

National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica Catholic Church in Royal Oak, Michigan is a well known Roman Catholic church and National Shrine executed in the lavish zig-zag Art Deco style. The structure was completed in two stages between 1931 and 1936. The sanctuary stands at 2100 West Twelve Mile Road at the northeast corner of Woodward Avenue and is a parish of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit. Construction was funded by the proceeds of the radio ministry of the controversial Father Charles Coughlin who broadcast from the tower during the 1930s.

Father Coughlin was an early supporter of the New Deal programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt before becoming one of Roosevelt's harshest critics. In 1934 he announced a new political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. He wrote a platform calling for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of the rights of labor, issuing antisemitic commentaries and supporting some policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Many American bishops as well as the Vatican did not sanction his views, in fact the V-12 Navy College Training Program was run by Catholic Universities during WW2. V-12 was similar to the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) which ran from 1942 to 1944 with a goal of providing more than 200,000 Army officers. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, it was the Roosevelt administration that finally forced the cancellation of his radio program and forbade the dissemination through the mail of his newspaper, Social Justice. The American public responded with "contributions which have flooded into his bank account as a result of these talks runs into thousands of dollars weekly.The membership ran into the millions, but it was not well-organized at the local level.

Named in honor of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux (who was also known as the Little Flower), the church was first built in 1926 in a largely Protestant area. Two weeks after it opened, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the church. The original wood structure was destroyed by a fire March 17, 1936. Construction of the new building started in 1931 and ended in 1936. Its completion was spurred by the destruction of the old structure and it employed large amounts of copper and stone to execute the designs of architect Henry J. McGill, of the New York firm of McGill and Hamlin.

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