Cover
story Serving a sea of commuters
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff New York
Every weekday morning from crack of
dawn on, thousands of people run, dawdle, drift or race up the escalators and
stairs out of Penn Station, out into Manhattan, off to work. Add the New Jersey
Transit and the Port Authority bus station crowds, and in a three-hour period
hundreds of thousands of commuters, roughly 25 percent of them Catholic,
converge on this part of New York City.
Coffee containers in one hand, bags and briefcases in the other,
ignoring everything and everyone, the tidal wave of humanity funnels up West
32nd Street, with a smaller eddy along West 31st Street.
Either way, they pass an entrance to St. Francis of Assisi Church.
Some on West 32nd Street turn sharp right into the church. Many just touch the
head, heels or hands -- all burnished yellow from the gesture -- of the
kneeling bronze statue of St. Francis in the little courtyard.
Others slip downstairs to attend one of the 13 daily liturgies --
the first at 6 a.m., the last at 5:30 p.m. -- or the popular 8:10 a.m. Liturgy
of the Hours.
Where in the world (shrines apart) is there another church with no
registered parishioners that has a pastor and 20 assistants, offers confessions
13 hours a day and utilizes 520-plus volunteers -- 250 for liturgical duties,
270 for social outreach? And has Br. Sebastian Tobin, a non-ordained friar,
making sandals in the basement. This is a commuters church such as is
possible only in New York.
¡Daily at 7 a.m., as it has since 1929, the St. Francis
Breadline -- a $600,000-plus-a-year project Ñ welcomes the hungry and
homeless for coffee and sandwiches.
Franciscans everywhere
This St. Francis complex is as much beehive as parish. There are
Franciscans everywhere. The friars are fire department and union chaplains,
physicians, psychotherapists, canon lawyers, teachers, treasurers, magazine
editors and the all-essential fundraisers. The parish has adult education
programs, seniors groups and self-help meetings, Filipino Fellowship, Masses in
Korean, devotions, novenas, stations, lecture series and outings. Catholic to
the core.
At Br. William Manns West 31st Street bookstore, even the
thieves are Catholics. One elderly soul dropped an unpaid-for videocassette
into her pocketbook. Mann asked her to replace it on the shelf. A hopeless
case? The video was, How to Make a Novena to St. Jude.
Hey, this is New York. If people rub St. Francis bronze
heels on West 32nd Street, someone knocked off most of the animals heads
on the St. Francis sculpture on West 31st Street.
Headlines come easily to Franciscans with their residences for the
mentally ill, their immigration services, their social outreach and Franciscan
Br. Daniel Sulmasy, physician and doctor of philosophy.
Sulmasy, head of the Department of Ethics at St. Vincents
Hospital, last October told an American Medical Association science reporters
conference that physicians sometimes have to lie to get insurance companies to
pay for treatment for their patients.
Faced with frustrating barrages of phone calls, faxes, letters and
bureaucratic barriers in their appeals to insurance companies, he said, doctors
are often ready to give up -- or lie. Such lies, said ethicist Sulmasy, are
akin to the answer youd give when harboring a refugee in the
basement and the tyrants thugs come to the door asking if hes
there.
Sulmasys ethical solution to U.S. medical fibs: health care
reform.
Hungry Marxists
If physicians do what they have to in order to care for the needy,
so does Franciscan Fr. Francis Kim. He controls 1,500 acres of farmland in
China. Hes leased a farm there to help starving North Koreans who fled
into China to survive. Through New Yorks Korean community and elsewhere,
he also raised more than $100,000 for rice and flour that he bought in China --
because the United States wouldnt sell him commodities for hungry
Marxists.
Back at West 31st Street, Kim, a convert (see accompanying story),
ministers to the burgeoning Korean Catholic community in Koreatown (32nd and
Broadway) just a block east of the church.
When tourist Massgoers scan the church bulletins pages,
which offer opportunities from the daily Good Word telephone message
(212-736-9233) to the St. Francis Creativity Group (helping the disadvantaged
with their arts projects), they might ask, Whats going on
here?
The answer is easy: business as usual.
St. Francis of Assisi Church, one of the citys oldest,
opened 156 years ago as a German parish. All that has changed in a century and
a half is the nationality of the immigrants. German, Irish and Italian in the
19th century; in the 21st, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, African, Latin
American, Middle Eastern, Central and Eastern European.
This church attracts the earlier immigrants (whose families have
dashed up Penn Central steps for two, three and four generations) to pray --
and they help out the new immigrants. The friars provide the essential
spiritual and social services in between.
To the New York archdiocese, St. Francis is a parish. To the
Franciscans, its a service church, a mission of the
Manhattan-based Franciscan Holy Name Province that covers the U.S. East
Coast.
The parish is heir to the very pieties of the people who
come here, said the current provincial, Fr. John Felice.
Sacramentally and devotionally, you could say this is a very traditional
Catholic haven. When I was first pastor [1973-82] there were a thousand people
a day coming to confession. (These days its about 1,200 a
week.)
In that earlier era, the parish was a mecca for the heavily
Irish-American-staffed Emigrant Savings Bank, now moved. Today, said Felice,
you find the Filipino community comes here largely because of the medical
complex on the East Side. And the Korean business community is just around the
corner.
Homeless and mentally ill
Felice has his own favorite work. When he was pastor, he noticed
an increasing number of homeless mentally ill in the daily breadline. New York
state was emptying its mental institutions into the streets.
Felice and Franciscan Frs. John McVean and Thomas Walters decided
that while they couldnt help all estimated 40,000 homeless, theyd
make a dent -- and maybe change the climate and regulations.
The mentally ill are repeatedly shortchanged in our
society, Felice said.
In 1980 the three opened the first of three St. Francis Residences
with money from their fundraising organization, St. Francis Friends of
the Poor. Today three former single-resident occupancy hotels offer
permanent housing with on-site services, full-time nurse therapist and
social worker, managerial and custodial staff; part-time psychiatrists.
There are museum trips, cooking lessons, all done in the
realization, said Felice, that we deal with a permanently disabled
population.
The residences have brought other tangible results. The
Franciscans fought to change city and state laws and regulations. Now
Franciscan Residences are regarded as a model -- not only locally, but also by
visitors from other states and countries.
Another response to the needs of troubled people is tackled by the
parishs 18-month-old counseling center in a warren of rooms on West 32nd
adjoining the church. Franciscan Fr. Brian Carroll, who directs the
eight-psychotherapist unit, sets the scene: This is a primarily
word-of-mouth-known center that tends to attract people whove never had
therapy before. Its church-based. Theyre comfortable.
The center restricts its range, concentrating on clients having
day-to-day relationship difficulties -- at work, in marriage, interpersonal
problems. Folks anxious, depressed -- 90 percent from outside Manhattan.
We offer anonymity.
Fees are based on a sliding scale. We have stockbrokers,
lawyers, doctors, professional people who can easily afford the full fee,
he said. That allows us to offer topnotch service to others who
couldnt otherwise come. And that includes the little band of
elderly neighborhood residents, depressed, isolated and irritably
knocking peoples knees with their canes in the supermarkets, said
Carroll. After counseling, and getting them on a good anti-depressive,
all of a sudden theyre back to taking care of themselves. Re-engaged in
society.
To the parish, its just one more important mission.
With the provinces 486 friars at a median age of 67-68, what
about future friars to keep all the ministries going? Five candidates in the
Bronx and eight novices in Wilmington, Del., are the answer (see accompanying
story).
Managing the chaos
Whos in charge at St. Francis? The buck stops
here, says the man with the bell. The bell is from the days when St.
Francis guardian and pastor, Fr. Ronald Stark, was dean at the
Franciscans now-closed minor seminary. There are still people who
break out in a cold sweat when they hear it, he said, impishly.
Stark is the humorous and self-deprecating presider over the chaos
that threatens but never quite erupts as everyone goes about the parishs,
the communitys and their own ministries. Hes guardian to the
friars, pastor to the floating community that counts as parishioners.
Think of the St. Francis faith community he presides over as
one of those huge schools of fish on nature television -- swirling, too many to
count and too small to individually identify at a glance. Unless they step
forward and identify themselves -- as in responding to an appeal in the church
bulletin seeking this type of volunteer or that. (Recent example:
Volunteer opportunity -- a shelter for single-parent families on the
Upper East Side has received a donation of several computers. Someone is needed
to set them up.) Someone did.
Thats typical.
So is John McGuinness, who handles crises for the subway system,
New Yorks Metropolitan Transit Authority. Though he lives outside the
city, after work he cradles AIDS babies or serves at St. Francis as a
liturgical minister.
Praying for volunteers
Patricia Ballner doesnt commute into New York by train; she
comes in by bus. Still, walking cross-town takes her past St. Francis. The
solo-practice Manhattan lawyer first popped into the church about three years
ago. She started attending the 5:30 p.m. Mass.
Someone handed out envelopes one evening. She glanced at hers,
decided shed open it later and write a check for whatever it was.
I stuffed it in my pocket, she said. When she opened
it, it was a sign-up card for volunteers. She stuffed it back in her pocket,
but it kept coming back. It was like a magnet. Id keep opening it
up and looking at it. Finally she signed up. Shes delighted. The
liturgical volunteers she meets range from high-ranking professionals, an
apartment building superintendent and the unemployed.
These days Ballner is not only a eucharistic minister. Shes
made quilts for the homeless and is currently organizing a library for the
liturgical ministers spirituality study group she helped start.
It was in 1997 that Fr. Chris Keenan and others began seriously
building a volunteer pool, now called St. Francis Cares. By last December, with
volunteer numbers so high it was taking a computer program to keep track of
them, Bonnie Wells joined the parish staff as director of volunteers.
She inherited 520 volunteers. She wants more -- tutors, mentors
and teachers of English as a second language. After 15 years in volunteer
management, said Wells, what drew her to St. Francis was the excitement
of being able, in a spiritual environment, to place volunteers. With her
organizational links, Wells knows New Yorks needs and that people
attracted to St. Francis are willing to give of themselves. The parish bulletin
helps her keep pulling in new volunteers, she said.
Its late afternoon in Manhattan. Theyre heading home
again, those 300,000 commuters. Some just rub St. Francis head or heels,
some pop into the church, some stay for evening Mass or prayers, some just use
the bathrooms in the parish office (the key is always available).
If they just grab a bulletin to read on the train or bus on the
way home and respond, chances are its St. Francis himself -- praying in
the little courtyard for ever more volunteers -- who will hook them and reel
them in.
National Catholic Reporter, June 16,
2000
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