Father Horace McKenna and the Slow Miracle
By Colman McCarthy
It’s the weekly support meeting. Support—moral support, emotional and occasionally financial support—is what many of the 110 homeless men were looking for the other morning. They came to the right place, the haven of hope and solace that is the Father McKenna Center in the basement of St. Aloysius Catholic Church. This is the Jesuit parish, a short walk from the U.S. Capitol but a world away from its concerns, to which Father Horace McKenna came in 1953 to answer the call of service to Washington’s destitute who needed food and housing.
On May 12, which is the 25th anniversary of the street priest’s death, a conference and liturgy will be held at St. Aloysius--both to honor the memory of Jesuit Horace McKenna and to find energy to carry on his labors. What he began as a one-man mission endures as a model program with an annual budget of $400,000, a paid staff of seven and a large supply of spirited volunteers. It is a drop-in center where lunch is served, plus a place to shower, wash clothes, get referrals for food stamps, flee the harsh pavements and--for a lucky six men--sleep in the night shelter as they transition from homelessness to independence.
At the 11 a.m. support meeting, the men listened to a speaker, amazed by grace plus his own grit, tell of his comeback from years of being lost. Others rose to speak of their small victories over the bottle or needle. After the meeting the men gathered for lunch, in keeping with the Gospel According to Horace: “You can’t talk to a person about his or her soul if that person has no food.”
Among those serving lunch was Tom Howarth, the McKenna director. As much as anyone who works daily on what is one of the city’s and nation’s most intractable social problems, he knows that the center’s succor and services can stretch only so far. “Horace used to talk about our having to perform ‘slow miracles,’” he said. “We have seen a few. We see it when a guy gets into a GED class or when he decides that he no longer wants to live on the streets and get into a drug or alcohol program. We see it when someone we helped meets us on the street and tells us that he made it through the crisis and things are better now. But it is going to take a larger and more intense effort to help people overcome homelessness. It will take an effort by the homeless themselves to reconnect with society. Doing better by the homeless and asking them to do better go hand in hand.”
Along with Edward and Kathleen Guinan at the Community for Creative Nonviolence, Pastor John Steinbruck of Luther Place Memorial Church, Veronica Maz of the House of Ruth, Sister Mary Ann Luby of Rachel’s Women’s Center and Rev. Imagene Stewart of the Church of What’s Happening Now, Horace McKenna helped make homelessness a national public policy issue in the 1970s. In time, at least half a dozen programs for the homeless would operate in the two mile stretch between the White House and Congress. It became America’s Homeless Belt, with Caesar at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and pharaohs at the other--and the invisible poor in between..
Horace McKenna twinned his spiritual life with daily personal relations with the outcastes. The closeness came to light when a homeless man gave his legal address as “the back seat of Father McKenna’s car,” a beat-up Renault.
In “Horace: Priest of the Poor,” John S. Monagan reports that during the Vietnam War years, Horace McKenna regularly protested the Johnson-Nixon policies. He was a pacifist and like Martin Luther King, Jr. saw connections between poverty, racism and militarism.
If the priest touched the lives of poor people, it was often the same among the affluent. A student at Gonzaga High School, which is next to the center, recently told an interviewer: “So you’d come in from the lily-white suburbs and you’d see the nation’s capitol looming in front of you and then…you’d walk by the morning line of homeless and poor and jobless men who were waiting in line at Father Horace McKenna’s. This was not lost on many of us walking into school by that line everyday: how lucky we were, how much we had.”
The school boy 30 years ago was Martin O’Malley, now the governor of Maryland.
After the support meeting and lunch, the men fanned out--some to parks, others to wander. Recalling the early years of his Washington ministry a half century ago, Horace McKenna said at the end of his life: “There were plenty of poor people around in those days. But of course there always are, if you keep your eyes open.”
Church doors, too.