September
11
A Year Later
From emotional trauma to lost jobs, Catholic agency assists
victims
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
New York
Ellen Shuman hopes people won’t sit in front of their
televisions all day on Sept. 11.
The danger of “getting re-traumatized” is real as the
anniversary of the terrorist attacks nears.
She hopes they will spend the day with family, classmates,
neighbors and fellow parishioners.
Shuman, a social worker who directs the Catholic Charities
Disaster Response Team for the Brooklyn diocese, has seen her agency deal with
more than 5,500 new cases since Sept. 11. While the diocese sustained scores of
deaths and many children lost a parent, the majority of those coming to
Catholic Charities are suffering from trauma, including the loss of employment
that has resulted from the terror.
Catholic Charities quickly assembled four mobile trauma teams,
dispatching them to its four family centers in Queens and Brooklyn. But it also
used parishes, schools and even went into people’s homes when “they
couldn’t get to us,” Shuman told NCR.
Although the agency has wide experience in handling airplane and
hurricane disasters, dealing with fires and with victims of loss and of
violence, “the massiveness of this, how fast we had to act and our pledge
to be here for people as long as they need us,” is what separated 9/11
from past tragedies, she said.
Out of such pain came healing, Shuman said, citing an invitation
to children in Belle Harbor and Breezy Point, N.Y., who were suffering from
loss and fear. The children were asked to write what they most wanted to send
away, then tape it to a balloon and release their balloon on the beach.
Another therapeutic innovation happened when wives of living
firemen, who knew each other at St. Francis de Sales parish in Belle Harbor,
met with Shuman to support one another. The women shared fears about their
husbands’ mental and physical health due to the loss of 343 comrades and
the hazardous conditions at ground zero. Later they were able to go to other
parishes and aid other firemen’s wives and their fear-filled children.
“We did what we needed to do,” Shuman said.
She related how staff stayed into the night cutting checks for
needy clients so that they would not be evicted, lose their electricity or have
their kids go hungry.
Meanwhile, Catholic Charities USA reached out to many affiliates
affected by 9/11. In response to proposals from the field and through the
support of thousands of Americans, it received $31 million in direct funding
for Sept. 11 disaster relief efforts. To date it has allocated $22.5 million in
grants to 24 Catholic Charities agencies from New York to Oakland, Calif.,
where four families suffered losses directly related to the attacks.
The $4.28 million that Brooklyn Catholic Charities has been
allocated by its national parent will insure that three trauma therapists will
be available for at least two years. Shuman is also grateful for the 275
volunteers who came from Catholic Charities in Albany, N.Y., to assist staff in
Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Amid the grieving, there’s progress. “People who
couldn’t leave their homes are getting on trains. Those who couldn’t
go to work are returning or seeking new jobs. People with suicidal thoughts are
getting on with their lives. There’s an outpouring of people who want to
talk to a priest, a rabbi, a counselor,” she said.
Catholic Charities in New York City realized that besides the
victims inside the falling towers, the toll of suffering around the World Trade
Center would be immense as the impact of the attacks on low-wage workers -- who
provided services to high-wage workers -- began to unfold. Estimates of job
losses in the disaster ranged from 75,000 to 90,000 with 40 percent still
unemployed a year later.
Wing Lam, director of the Chinese Staff and Worker Association
approached Catholic Charities New York. He has had good relations with the
agency over a decade. Hundreds in his organization had lost jobs as venders and
suppliers to the towers or as maintenance and restaurant workers. Moreover,
some two-thirds of Chinese New Yorkers live north of Canal Street, the border
of eligibility for emergency rental and other assistance set by federal
authorities. Lam’s group conducted interviews with jobless Chinese
workers, assessed needs and referred persons to Catholic Charities.
Catholic Charities issued grants of $1,000 to $6,000 to Chinese
workers and families, for a total of $1.6 million. “This is what we do all
the time,” said Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, executive director of Catholic
Charities for the New York archdiocese. With increased requests since 9/11, the
agency has had to add 15 to 20 social work staff, he said.
In the past Sullivan said that the agency had spent 90 percent on
social services and 10 percent on direct cash assistance to clients. In the
case of Sept.11 the percentages are reversed. To date Catholic Charities New
York has received $25.4 million in contributions, much of it from parishes and
dioceses across the land, and has aided some 9,000 clients.
Over the next three years, it will spend $8 million on employment
assistance, including a Web-based job network, short-term training classes,
support services to certain industries, paid internships and direct job
placement. The agency has reserved $5.7 million in a scholarship fund for the
91 children in Catholic schools who lost a parent or guardian on 9/11. It has
also identified 57 families directly affected by the attacks.
Students at 28 Catholic primary and nine high schools in Jersey
City, Bayonne and Hoboken may have witnessed the towers burn and fall. For days
afterwards they saw and smelled smoke rising across the Hudson in Lower
Manhattan. Catholic Charities of Newark archdiocese rapidly dispatched social
workers to 55 schools, offering stress counseling as the tragedy unfolded.
A year later it has provided resources to all parochial schools in
the archdiocese. “We want students, educators and parents to see how our
world has changed since that day,” said Julie Willis, disaster relief
coordinator for the archdiocese.
Dominican Sr. Dominica Rocchio, archdiocesan superintendent of
schools, said she hopes students will not relive the fear that gripped them
last year, but will instead recall what happened, show tolerance to one another
and become more appreciative of people different from us. Rocchio’s office
received $80,000 from the Catholic schools of Cincinnati, where Charity Sr.
Katherine Connelly is superintendent and was one of the first to respond. The
money has been used to pay tuition for students who lost a parent on Sept.11
and for those whose parent or parents lost employment.
Catholic Charities personnel were among the first volunteers at
Liberty State Park in New Jersey where the wounded and those traumatized in the
evacuation arrived by ferry. Having learned from the experience of Catholic
Charities in Oklahoma City, Willis said that the agency is committed to
long-term care of those with stress disorders, job losses and immigration
issues. It’s being assisted with a $1.6 million grant from Catholic
Charities USA.
Fr. Ed Lambro said he’s been surprised and heartened by the
maturity and response of the Catholic faithful to the tragedy, and by the
“deepening of their faith,” which he said he has observed. The
clinical psychotherapist and development director of Catholic Charities in
Paterson, N.J., said he was stunned by their generosity as well.
Catholics in the diocese, which includes some of the richest
communities in the state and some of its worst slums, gave $650,000 for relief
aid -- “the largest second collection in diocesan history.” In
addition Paterson received $1.88 million from Catholic Charities USA.
Lambro spoke with pride of “our Irish, Italian and Hispanic
firefighters” from whom “we’ve heard no venom” against the
perpetrators of 9/11, he said. Instead “ they have referenced their youth
in Catholic schools, their faith and their parishes.” He called the slain
firefighters’ chaplain, Franciscan Fr. Mychal Judge “a martyr of the
faith.”
People want to find a reason for such tragedy so they can control
their anxiety, he said. “But some things are unreasonable. I don’t
know why it happened,” the priest-clinician said. “Often they think
that too, but they just can’t say it.”
National Catholic Reporter, September 6,
2002
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