As a boy, every Halloween I would dress up as a “bum.” It was probably the most common costume in my neighborhood. Dad would put me in old, dirty, smelly clothes that didn’t fit, mess up my hair and, with a piece of burnt cork, rub my face to make it look dirty. My “hobo” outfit was a hit!
It dawns on me now, and causes some embarrassment, that I was ridiculing homeless people. These “bums” — in our minds, in our world — were dirty, offensive and deserved ridicule.
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But it is never good to depersonalize, to stereotype, to reduce any person or group of people to an object of scorn or derision.
That’s the temptation we must carefully avoid as this city we love comes together to consider how most effectively to meet the challenge presented by our homeless men and women.
Disagree we can and will over what best to do to help them, while preserving the safety and quality of our city, two noble goals. What we cannot do is reduce these troubled people to objects, to animals, to “a problem to get rid of.”
Pope Francis, who will visit us soon, is not always a warm and cuddly pastor who says nice things. He just may encourage us to reach out with compassion to these street people, who are not lazy “bums and hobos,” but usually people struggling mightily with mental illness and addictions. As the Pope commented from the Vatican soon after his election: “If a person, on a winter’s night, dies here on the street nearby, that’s not news. It seems normal! On the other hand, a drop of 10 points on the stock exchange is a tragedy. People are discarded, as if they were garbage!”
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I admit I’m preaching to myself as well as to anybody else here. I confess at times I’m at my wit’s end wondering how to help, not only all the homeless here in town, but the individual ones who bother me or cause me to turn my head away from them on my walk to work.
So it is good that the plight of those without food and shelter has become conversation around our own kitchen tables. How we help them can give rise to good debates.
That we should reach out should not be debatable.
Not long ago, a young homeless married couple stopped me after Mass in the cathedral. Yes, I’m afraid they fit the stereotype: unclean, smelly, agitated and irrational. They were in distress, yet reluctant to accept the remedies I tried to offer. I did what I could, but was still bothered when they left again for the streets.
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A week or so later, I got a frantic letter from the out-of-town parents of the young man. In one of his rare phone calls to them, he had apparently told them he had visited me. The folks let me know of their relief, that they had been living in agony for months wondering where their son, who had a sad history of emotional problems, had gone, or even if he were alive. They begged me to persuade him to come home.
That young homeless couple was someone’s son and daughter. He and she were not “garbage,” but human beings, who, as the prophets of Israel and Jesus remind us, are God’s children, made in His image, deserving dignity and respect. In fact Isaiah, the great Jewish prophet, tells us what we must do to draw near to God: “Is it not sharing your bread with the hungry, bringing the afflicted and the homeless into your house; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own flesh?”
While very grateful for the wonderful work of Catholic Charities, our religious orders, our parishes and people in showing compassion to our street people, I confess we can do more, and will, hopefully in partnership with our state and city leaders.
We must. We are Americans. We are New Yorkers. We are believers. As Pope Francis recalls, “The measure of the greatness of a society is found in the way it treats those most in need, those who have nothing apart from their poverty.”
Dolan is archbishop of New York.
