Washington's Father Of the Homeless

It was the weekly support meeting. Support -- moral, emotional and occasionally financial -- was what many of the 110 homeless men were seeking one recent morning. They had come to the right place, the haven of hope and solace that is the Father McKenna Center at St. Aloysius Catholic Church.

That Jesuit parish, a short walk from the Capitol but a world away from its concerns, is where the Rev. Horace B. McKenna came in 1953 to answer the call of service to Washington's destitute.

Marking the 25th anniversary of McKenna's death, a conference and liturgy were held yesterday at St. Aloysius -- to honor his memory 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 volunteers. It is a drop-in center where lunch is served and where homeless men can find a place to shower, wash clothes, get food stamp referrals, flee the harsh pavement and -- for a lucky six -- sleep overnight as they transition from homelessness to independence.

At the recent support meeting, the men listened to a speaker tell of his comeback from years of being lost. Others rose to speak of their small victories over the bottle or needle. Afterward they 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 that day was Tom Howarth, the McKenna director, who knows that the center's succor can stretch only so far. "Horace used to talk about our having to perform 'slow miracles,' " Howarth said, acknowledging that miracles can happen. "We have seen a few. [But] 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 Rachael's Women's Center and the 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 grandees 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.

And he touched the lives not only of poor people but of the affluent, too. A student at Gonzaga College High School, which is next to the center, recently recalled: "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. That was not lost to many of us walking into school by that line every day: how lucky we were, how much we had."

The schoolboy 30 years ago was Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland.

After the support meeting, the men fanned out -- some to parks, others to wander. Recalling the early years of his Washington ministry half a century ago, Horace McKenna said toward 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."

And your church doors, too.

-- Colman McCarthy

Washington

The writer, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace and teaches nonviolence at several local universities and high schools.