by Msgr. Vincent E. Puma
After fifty years of being a priest, having spent most of those years in poor parishes, I have a sensitivity for the needs of the poor and understand how they can be “used.”
I was raised in a middle class or better financial family. My father and mother both earned money and worked very hard to get ahead, having raised my sister and me during the Depression. We did live alongside many who had real poverty problems and many of my friends let me understand the poverty issues in their lives.
My path to the priesthood was not unusual—the example of good priests in our parish and the feeling that I could serve the poor were influences on me. My concern for the poor came primarily from my mother who was a natural social worker and who knew how to “work” the system to get ahead. She was a master manipulator who was concerned about our neighbors and therefore organized and mobilized the forces available to help them get ahead.
My priesthood assignments were with ethnically diverse parishes for the first fifteen years. I went from an Italian parish, to a Spanish-speaking parish, to a black parish.
As director of a Spanish apostolate I learned how important the Church was in Spanish-speaking people’s lives. Social work was part and parcel of their expectations of their priests. Working with disadvantaged families of all kinds taught me how lucky I was to have good family values and how much these families suffered when family values were absent.
Along came the Cuban revolution and I become deeply immersed in the Miami and New Jersey connection. Exporting unaccompanied children from Miami to the North and then reuniting them with their parents to form family again, was a unique experience.
These hard years taught me that the Church could be an all-powerful force in making people’s lives better but often I felt the discrimination from the upper middle class and the Church. I became alert and insightful about organizations, which used the poor to create money machines for financial gain with fancy stories and professional money raising techniques, which did little or nothing to help the poor.
Along the way, some twenty years ago, I realized that the churches, both Catholic & Protestant, were not able to reach down to the new crop of the poor who were afflicted with not just a shortage of money but were terribly sick with addictions, AIDs, TB and a shortage of jobs. Hunger was an evident problem but the primary underlying issue was often drug addiction. The poor knocking on our rectory doors caused us to get organized and build up a community base to begin feeding the poor.
Out of this came the need to resign from my parish, detach from the Church, and mobilize forces to work for the poor and their needs apart from Church control.
From this principle and conviction, came a strange unique, independent kitchen, known as Eva's Kitchen, which grew and grew into an overwhelming group of beautiful buildings to be named later as Eva's Village. This is now the largest comprehensive poverty program in New Jersey and perhaps in the country.
Its beautiful buildings are worth approximately 10 million dollars, built entirely free of church control and feeding a 1000 meals a day, 300 to walk-ins from the street and the rest to the 250 poor men, women and families who live with us in a three phase program of rehabilitation.
This experience of the past twenty years has taught me that many wealthy people are looking for “good investments” to place their charity money with. It also taught me that we must investigate the financial practices of so many charity organizations which, we learned even more clearly since September 11, use money very freely and capriciously.
When one organization misuses funds, all of us suffer. When one organization spends 25% of its income raising money, they cheat those who work hard and honestly to raise money legitimately. Just read the pathetic stories invented by these mail hustlers and realize their imaginations are seriously addicted to lying to get money.
One rehabilitation center spends $50,000 per client per year; another spends $95,000 per client per year. How can you figure this organization out? Just call and ask what their yearly budget is and how many yearly clients they serve. Divide the dollar amount by the number of clients and you have your answer. Each client could go through Harvard on the money spent in some organizations!
How many people know what percentage of our “charity” funds is from the U.S. Government? Take two Eastern dioceses for example. A diocese with 200 parishes collects $500,000 from their parishes to donate to Catholic Charities and then matches that amount with millions from government sources. Another diocese with 110 parishes donates from the central fund the same amount of $500,000 and matches that with $15 million of government grants and contracts. All of this is legitimate but the people in the pews believe they are exclusively supporting their charities while in reality the government is carrying the major portion.
The popular current diocesan drives for $40 to $100 million will produce a long list of charities managed by the diocese. But one should inquire how much of the major drive will really go to the charitable cause or program. The good work done by the charity is “used” to produce funds for almost anything.
One Southern diocese was about to launch a campaign and was asked what amount of money will be drawn from the collections for a diocesan charity. The answer was “none” at first but after the campaign they will get some. Meaning the charity would be used but there was no guarantee they would receive a definite amount of money. It is all too common to find that the charity has to raise much of its own money but is nonetheless used in fundraising efforts of the diocese.
Wealthy people have caught on and therefore are willing to donate directly to the activity, which “puts it on the table” rather then go through a government, social organization or church funnel to get to the poor.
Eva’s Village, located in Paterson, New Jersey, provides food, medical care, shelter, and counseling and rehabilitation services to the poorest of the poor.
Msgr. Vincent E. Puma has written a book on his fifty years of priesthood, Son of a Bishop. Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Msgr. Puma was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1951 for the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey. He completed graduate work at Drew University (S.T.M.) and Seton Hall University (Ed.S.).
