Mayor John Hickenlooper wants to end homelessness in Denver over the next 10 years. He wants the help of metro faith communities to do it. We need to admire his courage in highlighting the problem of homelessness, and we need to do more to address it.
For Catholics, the issue of homelessness goes right to the heart of living the Gospel in the face of today's social challenges. Here's why.
Christian discipleship seeks to apply the word of God and the wisdom of his Church to the issues of the modern world. Catholics and all persons of good will have a common stake in engaging the social problems of the age. It makes sense, where possible, to find ways to work together to build the common good and serve the needs of the poor.
Serving human dignity begins with ensuring every person's right to life from conception to natural death. That always means defending the disabled, the terminally ill and the unborn child. But our obligations go beyond that. The right to life implies other rights. It implies the right to adequate food, clothing and medical care, justice under the law and opportunities to earn a living. It also implies a right to adequate shelter; to a place each of us can call "home."
The Catholic Church in northern Colorado has worked to ease homelessness for a long time. Samaritan House, affiliated with archdiocesan Catholic Charities, offers 350 beds to the homeless each night on an annual budget of about $2.5 million"$2 million of which is raised from private, non-government sources. The archdiocese, through our Catholic Charities, also runs Guadalupe Shelter in Greeley (40 beds), The Mission in Fort Collins (40 beds), Father Ed Judy House in Denver (for homeless families) and 78 units of transitional housing. With the support of the archdiocese, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity also recently opened a new shelter for homeless women, Gift of Mary.
Other faith-based groups, like the Family Rescue Ministry of the Denver Rescue Mission and many others, also do excellent, sacrificial work in helping the homeless. But still more can and needs to be done.
Because the homeless can often seem invisible"especially to Coloradoans who live in suburban and rural areas"it's easy to ignore the problem. It's also true that the homeless population has an intractable core of alcohol and drug addicts, the mentally ill and people who simply refuse to work. But many others end up on the street because they lose their job, can't make enough at work to meet their bills or exhaust their resources on family medical problems. Homelessness for an adult male is a hard experience. For runaway children, single females or a mother who's the lone parent of a family, homelessness is a life-threatening disaster that undercuts the soul of our whole community.
As a result, Denver's homelessness problem really belongs to all of us"civil authorities, businesses, private foundations and religious communities alike. This is especially true in the metro area, but homelessness as an issue goes well beyond Denver. It's a wound against human dignity that should concern Catholics and other people of good will across the whole state.
Of course, both God and the devil are in the details. How public authorities and private groups"including religious communities"can better work together to ease homelessness remains to be explored and made real in the coming months. In today's environment, religious communities need to be especially alert to protecting their identity and freedom of action. And good people can legitimately agree or disagree with the elements in the mayor's plan and the analysis behind it.
But American Catholics have always been led by their religious faith into the public square to work for the common good. The realities of homelessness offer men and women of faith another invitation to serve. We welcome it. And we respect and applaud Mayor Hickenlooper for his efforts to engage the issue.
