MISSION STATEMENTS.

Innovative religious orders show that mission work means going--or staying--where there is need, proving that you don't have to pa&your bags to be a missionary.

The Claretians working on Chicago's South Side are mainly in the business of saving souls. But recently, they found themselves in the garbage-hauling business. Volunteers and members of their neighborhood organization, the Claretian Associates, removed hundreds of pounds of trash and hacked away at overgrown trees and shrubs to create People's Park, an oasis of green in a rundown, crime-ridden section of the city. The park is but one element of the Claretians' work at Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in the community of South Chicago. They also help renovate dilapidated apartment buildings, assist residents in getting home loans, and manage a senior citizen housing project.

In Camden, New Jersey, the Jesuits at Holy Name Parish offer medical and legal assistance--as well as spiritual guidance--to Hispanics living in one of that city's poorest neighborhoods. The Jesuits pressured the city to locate a police substation in the neighborhood, a move that helped drive out crack cocaine dealers. The order's parish there sponsors the local Little League and a basketball tournament. "What we're doing is trying to rebuild a community," says Father Rick Malloy, S.J.

In St. Louis, a group of Franciscan brothers is putting a new twist on their founder's vision of working with the needy wherever they may be found. The brothers at St. Anthony of Padua Friary helped fund, build, and currently manage a 12-story senior citizen housing development. They provide transportation and organize social activities, regularly check each resident's blood pressure, and dispense medication.

Across America, missionary orders are finding new impetus for their centuries-old mandate to serve the poor. Once, these orders filled gaps in the nation's social services safety net not met by government. Today, increasingly, they are working in cooperation with government agencies and other religious denominations doing grassroots community work. The St. Louis Franciscans, for instance, coordinate with several other groups in running a home for single pregnant women. In Chicago, the Claretian Associates work closely with the federal Home Loan Bank, the national nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services, and Lutheran Family Services.

One thing is clear: Without the presence of these religious orders, decay and hopelessness might have swallowed these urban neighborhoods. In short, they are helping save troubled communities as well as troubled souls.

"We're on the cutting edge of missionary work," says Father Bruce Wellems, the Claretian pastor of Holy Cross Parish who runs a publicly funded alternative school on Chicago's Southwest Side for students who drop out of school or have been expelled so often they no longer have anywhere else to go.

"There's sometimes a sense that `missionary' means going away, going abroad, far away into some foreign land," says Maureen Abood, the Claretians' communications director. "But [many religious orders] look at it as meeting the needs around them, going here into the inner city and saying, `That's missionary work, because it's going where the need is.'"

Often that means religion has to take a backseat to more pressing needs. "When you get into a place like Camden [the fifth-poorest city in the United States], you see that the very structures of society--the institutions of society--have been so weakened that you have to start strengthening and bolstering them before you can get into the spiritual aspect," Malloy says.

Still, he sees his community work there tied to the Jesuit order's spiritual mission. "To be people of faith calls us to establish right relationships in society. Certainly the catechism itself talks about the sinful inequities that are a contradiction of the gospel. Until we eradicate some of those sinful inequities in our society, we haven't fulfilled the mission of Christ."

Faith at work

These religious orders are also on the cutting edge of a movement that is gaining momentum across America: the use of faith-based organizations to solve chronic social problems. Both parties' front-runners in the presidential election campaign, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, have endorsed the idea of allowing faith-based groups to use government funds for grassroots community work.

Those already doing work, however, are realistic about how much they can accomplish. Government funding is crucial, they say. And they acknowledge they cannot do it alone: It takes a multilevel partnership with government, other religious denominations and nonprofit groups, and the business community.

"There are some things I think we do better, and there are some things we don't do as well," says Pat O'Connell, the lay executive director of Claretian Associates. "Sometimes we will make a decision that's not the best from a purely business perspective. But we feel it's the best from a community revitalization standpoint.... Yet, someone coming in with just good intentions or a wonderful mission, and without some of the tools and knowledge that a for-profit brings, is not going to be effective."

The religious orders are clear, however, on why church organizations are often more successful than their government counter-parts. "There is one simple fact about faith-based organizations," says Malloy. "Most of the people who work here, live here. In a lot of the more bureaucratic, governmental institutions, the people who work there, don't live there."

Wellems says this is a key factor at the alternative school he runs for troubled teens in Chicago. "The staff and myself are monitoring whether the kids go to school because we know the families, by and large. We're willing to go out on the streets and get to know them. We're inviting teachers to go into relationships. They will call up kids who dropped out some time ago to track them.... That's community-based work at its best."

What's also different is that these religious orders aren't using a broad "Great Society" vision to deal with social injustice but are addressing problems on a community-by-community basis. Their success is measured day-to-day in the smallest of human details.

Wellems' alternative school, for instance, is in a neighborhood with a 70 percent dropout rate. Many of the students associate with gangs and have been actively involved in the drug trade as a means of supporting their families, he says.

"I'll never forget the time [one boy] came to me and said, `I just can't come to school today. I have to sell. I have to do my business because we don't have any food in the house. I have to do this,'" Wellems said. "I asked him, `Can you come to half a day of school and then go out and do your business?' And he said, `Yeah.' So he came and he stayed for the whole day. I considered that a minor victory, but an important one."

Wellems' school, though publicly funded, is named after the late Sister Irene Dugan, R.C., a longtime community activist. The school runs from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., the peak hours for street crime and violence in the neighborhood. Students are served dinner there.

"No religion classes," the Chicago schools superintendent told Wellems when he first approved funding for Wellems' program. Wellems' status as a priest, however, allows him some leeway to teach important life lessons.

It helped him address the tragedy of so many young people dying violent deaths in the neighborhood. After one youth, Jose "Beto" Montelongo, who was instrumental in getting the school started, was killed in a drive-by shooting, Wellems asked a group of students to hold a vigil at Dugan's bedside when she was dying.

"There were about 11 or 12 of them.... I said, `You've seen how a person dies violently. This is how a person dies in peace.'"

Wellems sees his work at the school as an extension of the traditional mission of the Claretians, who also publish this magazine. The order's founder, Saint Anthony Claret, was a Spanish missionary and advocate for the poor. "Claretians take an option for the poor. They take an option for the unchurched, for the family, and for youth."

Being part of a religious order, Wellems believes, gives him a creative edge. "Traditionally, people see the work of an archdiocese as maintaining the church. Missionary orders are really meant to serve a population or a need in an archdiocese that requires some creativity."

Being part of an order's community also provides its priests an extra measure of support. Still, Wellems says, his is sometimes a lonely, complex job. "Being on a creative edge sometimes makes you feel very alone because not many people know that frontier."

There's no place like home

A few miles from Wellems' neighborhood, the Claretian Associates are attempting to address another pressing need that has long challenged federal and local governments: how to provide decent, affordable housing in low-income urban areas. Sometimes, O'Connell, the Claretian Associates' director, sounds more like a real-estate developer than a church worker.

"We just did a rehab of an eight-flat that was a complete gut job," she says proudly. But O'Connell sees housing development as a contemporary response to the Claretian order's original mission.

"Housing development is so visual. It's very concrete, not to use a pun. And that's one of the things we talk about quite a lot, having a visible impact in a community, showing visible signs of change," O'Connell says.

Those signs abound in the 12-block area around Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in South Chicago where the Claretians have focused their energies. Using a creative mix of funding, they are working on building a series of affordable single-family homes.

"We told the architect we didn't want an institutional, boxy design. So the design he came up with is row houses with different designs.... We are also planning a child-care center there," O'Connell says.

The neighborhood is largely made up of Mexican-American descendants of people who settled in the area in the 1920s to work in the steel mills. In Our Lady of Guadalupe, their ancestors founded what is believed to be the oldest Hispanic church in the Midwest. But when the steel mills began closing in the 1970s, the area fell into rapid decline and has remained depressed.

So great is the housing need that when the Claretians finished renovating one apartment building several months ago, they received 160 inquiries for the eight units.

The apartment project brought with it an added benefit: The Claretian Associates hired a construction contractor willing to provide training and jobs for neighborhood residents. "[People] who worked on that building lived within five blocks of the building," O'Connell says. "I think there were 15 people hired from the neighborhood. Out of 15, they had just two wash out. That's extremely good odds, given the fact that these were people who were unemployed before that."

Creative collaboration

In their work in the Dutchtown South area of St. Louis, a mixed neighborhood of Eastern Europeans, Asians, Latinos, and African Americans, the Franciscans have created a model of working with existing community-based organizations. In fact, Brother Loyola Freightman, O.F.M. sits on a number of boards, including the archdiocese's Head Start program; Our Lady's Inn, a home for single pregnant women; and Tap Roots, an after-school program that helps students with homework and offers dance, art, carpentry, and design classes.

"These various programs are within the shadow of our church," Freightman says. "It makes no difference what a person's religion is. If there's a need in the community, we find a way to respond." The only projects the Franciscans run on their own are a food pantry and the senior housing project.

Freightman also serves as a neighborhood captain. Captains work directly with the police to improve safety within a two-block area. "We're proud of keeping the neighborhood somewhat stable, so we don't get houses that are abandoned and closed up," he says.

Malloy, the Camden Jesuit, also stresses collaboration. "We work really well with other groups in the neighborhood. One group is doing housing, another group is doing the food kitchen down the street. So we said, `Hey, there's no need for housing, no need for the soup kitchen. Don't duplicate things.'"

So the Jesuits decided to focus on unmet needs. After the bishop of Camden invited the order to take over Holy Name Parish in 1982, a Jesuit lawyer established a legal aid service in the largely Hispanic neighborhood. A Jesuit who is a physician still runs a medical practice there, and the order hired a sister to establish a family services office to help local residents with immigration problems.

The Jesuits also tried to revive the parish school. "One of the little jingles we came up with was, `Holy Name School--Where Miracles Happen Every Day.' One of the miracles is that you can get someone to come in and teach at half what she'd be making in a public school."

Malloy believes being part of a religious order makes his work somewhat easier. Prior to the Jesuits' arrival, a succession of diocesan priests had rotated through the crack-ridden neighborhood. "The inner city is a hard deal for a solo priest," he says.

Although the crack epidemic has subsided, economic problems still plague the densely populated neighborhood at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge between Camden and Philadelphia. "I have not seen, from my vantage point, the benefits of this roaring economy. The people in my neighborhood were not significantly better off in 1998 than they were in 1988," Malloy says.

Still, he points with pride to the neighborhood's successes. "There's one family up the street who lived on the worst drug-dealing corner in Camden. They had eight kids, all fine, upstanding citizens. We've seen our efforts pay off. But it's hard to say it was the Jesuits alone."

Most of the time, however, success comes in more subtle forms. Malloy recalls a visit he received one day from a woman who wasn't Catholic but wanted some help for her ailing father. The woman began visiting the priest on a regular basis.

"She started telling me the story of her life, and it's one of those things you can't believe. Raped by a cousin as girl. Abused and used by people all her life.... Drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, the whole nine yards. Here she is, 40 years old ... and she goes, `I have a question for you. This life I got, is this what God wants for me? Does God hate me or what?'

"At rock bottom, that's what I'm doing in Camden--at least letting people know God doesn't hate them," Malloy says. "But if you're going to say God loves us, you've got to make it real. You've got to make it a better world for people who have had a lot of pain and suffering in their lives."

RELATED ARTICLE: A CHURCH ON THE MOVE

In the words of pastor Father Michael Jacques, S.S.E., St. Peter Claver Parish, an African American church in inner-city New Orleans, is "a place in the city where people can see a church that's on the move."

A parish intensely involved in community organizing, social action, vibrant liturgy, and the needs of its members, St Peter Claver reflects the mission of the religious order that operates it, the Society of Saint Edmund.

From its headquarters in Vermont, members of the Society of Saint Edmund, a religious congregation of priests and brothers, have worked from New England to the South and beyond to Venezuela in pastoral work, Catholic higher education, and spiritual renewal and development. In response to Pope Plus' Xl's 1937 call for missionaries to serve among African Americans and Native Americans, the Edmundites have also been working among African Americans in the South since that time.

When the Second Vatican Council mandated the renewal of Catholic religious orders and congregations, it called for Va continuous return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration behind a given community.... It serves the best interest of the church for communities to have their own special character and purpose" [Perfectae Caritas, no. 2).

The Edmundites see part of their "special character and purpose" to be establishing the presence of the church where it otherwise might not be and "showing people that the church is for them." They have sought to serve in communities that have not always been favored. They also work to respond to human needs and commit themselves to lay involvement in the life of the church in general and Edmundite apostolates in particular.

According to Jacques, part of the Edmundite mission also involves empowering people to be themselves and feel connected to and comfortable in the church. To this end St Peter Claver celebrates liturgy incorporating African symbols, dance, and other forms of culture. The parish incorporates into its life the Nguzo Saba--seven principles drawn from African thought: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa(cooperative economics), Nia(purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith)--and connects them to principles from the Bible. Some parishioners have told Jacques that SL Peter Claver was their last stop before leaving the church.

The Sunday liturgy is the place where all the activities of the parish come together. The parish has a renowned choir, effort is made to make preaching effective, and parishioners have a high level of participation in ministries. Since the early 1980s, SL Peter Claver has grown from 800 to 2,500 families and has become the largest black Catholic parish in Louisiana.

The parish belongs to a faith-based community organizing effort called All Congregations Together (ACT). Made up of 56 religious communities from a variety of denominations as well as a Jewish congregation, ACT is the largest faith-based community organization in New Orleans. Recently, the group marched with local politicians to advocate changing a law so that landlords who have abandoned or neglected their property could be more effectively prosecuted.

The parish also operates an independent community development corporation to purchase and reclaim local properties so residents can more easily own homes and control what goes in their neighborhoods. Drug rehabilitation and crime prevention also appear on St. Peter Claver's social action agenda. Every week parishioners give local police a "hot list" of sites in the neighborhood where crime has been a particular problem.

At the heart of all these activities, Jacques believes, is growth in love. As the parish's mission statement puts it: "St. Peter Claver is an African American Christ-centered Catholic faith community, which is growing in love, built by the labor of its ancestors, sustained by the faith of elders and the energy of its youth." Describing the parish, Jacques echoes the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "If I can help somebody as I pass along the way, my life will not have been in vain."

--Joel Schorn

JUDITH VALENTE covers religion and ethics for PBS-TV. BETH DEMES is a writer living in Chicago.