[Down through the years I have heard about a wonderful Jesuit priest in Washington D.C. with the name of Horace McKenna, S.J. Then
when I was stationed in Annapolis - with lots of people who went to Jesuit
schools in DC, I heard his name mentioned even more.
I heard a relative once say, “If all priests
were like Father Horace McKenna, I’d go
to church more often."
In these times when priests are not being seen in the best
light, I thought I’d do a blog piece and a shout out about this great servant: Father Horace McKenna.
Years ago I did this for Father Alec Reid, a
Redemptorist, who worked in Northern Ireland. Check my blog for September 8, 2014. Also check this blog piece about Father
Horace McKenna, Jesuit. Thanks.]
OBITUARY FOR FATHER HORACE McKENNA, SJ
The youngest of 6 children, Horace was born in 1899 New
York City, the son of Dr.Charles F. McKenna, a respected chemist and
first chemical engineering graduate of Columbia University School of Mines, and
Laura O'Neill McKenna. Educated at Fordham Preparatory School, he
entered the Society of Jesus at St.
Andrew-on-the-Hudson on July 30, 1916. Between 1921 and 1923, he taught in a
Jesuit school in Manila, Philippines. There, he discovered the desperate needs
of the poor and oppressed. He was ordained June 23, 1929 and assigned to pastor
parishes in southern Maryland amidst poverty and Church, St. James' Church, St. Ignatius' Church and St.
Inigoes's where he was assigned in June of 1931. Here he worked for twenty-two
years, and among his efforts helped create the Ridge Purchasing and Marketing
Association. He was active in civil rights, Vietnam-era anti-war
protests and the Poor People's Campaign.
From 1953 to 1958, he served at St. Aloysius Gonzaga
parish, a Jesuit church a few blocks north of the U.S. Capitol and then as
assistant pastor at the Church of the Gesu in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from
1958 to 1964. In 1964 he returned to St. Aloysius and remained there for the
rest of his life, living at Gonzaga College High School and
serving the poor. In his commitment to social justice in Washington,
D.C., Fr. McKenna founded So Others Might Eat, a soup
kitchen, clinic and employment center; Martha's
Table, a soup kitchen and child
education center; and House of Ruth, a center for homeless women. He was also
one of the leaders in establishing the Sursum Corda Cooperative, a
housing development for the poor. Documentation of his life's work is
maintained in the Georgetown University -Library
Special Collections Division.
Fr. McKenna was named "Washingtonian of the
Year" by Washingtonian Magazine in
1977. He received an honorary degree from the University of Scranton in
1998. The McKenna Center, a local shelter and soup kitchen for homeless men,
located under the Great Church of St. Aloysius, was named after him in 1982.
McKenna Walk NW, a short street within Sursum Corda, is also named after him.
The Father McKenna Center is still located in the
basement of Saint Aloysius Catholic
Church at 900 North Capitol Street NW in Washington, DC. The
McKenna Center exists to meet the needs of the poor and homeless who reside in
one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods despite being in the shadow of
the US Capitol Building. McKenna
Center serves the needs of the poor, men, women and children. Each day, the
McKenna Center fulfills the Gospel instruction to “feed the hungry, shelter the
homeless and clothe the naked”.
HORACE MCKENNA
APOSTLE OF THE POOR
Kevin O’Brien
America Magazine,
September 17, 2007
A line
still forms outside the Father McKenna Center at St. Aloysius Church in
Washington, D.C. People come to the cramped but homey church basement looking for
food, clothing, housing and personal support. They still tell stories about
Father McKenna, who died 25 years ago. To know the story of Father McKenna is
to enter into the lives of the poor whom he loved as a father. “You can’t
understand me if you don’t understand my people,” Horace liked to tell his
friends as he brought them for a walk around the neighborhood.
In his
lifetime, as they do today, people freely called Father McKenna a “saint.” His
father, Charles, had a sense of things to come. In his insightful biography,
Horace: Priest for the Poor, John S. Monagan recounts how Charles insisted that
his son be baptized with the name Horace. The priest protested: There is no St.
Horace. “He’ll be the first,” Charles replied. Thus was Horace McKenna baptized
in a New York City church in the winter of 1899.
Horace
met the Jesuits at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. As war raged in
Europe, Horace entered the tranquil confines of the Jesuit novitiate
overlooking the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, north of New York City. There
he immersed himself in Jesuit ways of praying and benefited from a learning
that was, by his own account, “deep, broad and accurate.” After professing his
first vows, he studied humanities and philosophy, growing in “confidence in
thought, truth and love.”
Horace
was then assigned to teach at a high school for affluent boys in Manila,
Philippines. Far removed from his comfortable upbringing and the insular world
of studies, Horace felt his mind and heart stretched. He remembered
particularly how an elderly Filipino Jesuit would regularly canvass the school
playground for scraps of food left over by the privileged students. The brother
would then bring the food over to the school wall, where hungry children
anxiously waited for the delivery. According to Monagan, the Jesuit brother’s
kindness and the children’s desperation made a lasting impression on Horace.
When he
returned to the United States to study theology at the Jesuit seminary in
Woodstock, Md., not far from Baltimore, Horace taught Sunday school to
African-American children who were not permitted to attend the segregated
parochial school. Like his experience with the poor in Manila, his contact with
those children transformed his understanding of his priesthood. After Horace
was ordained in 1929, he asked his superiors to send him to work with
African-American families suffering under segregation laws.
With the
blessing of his superiors, Father McKenna made his way to southern Maryland,
where for over 20 years he served as a pastor. Horace thrived in his
sacramental and pastoral duties, traveling around southern Maryland in his old
car. Walter Burghardt, S.J., then a young priest, recalls driving with Horace
and stopping frequently so that Horace could say hello to people along the way,
usually addressing them by their last name as a sign of respect. During the
Great Depression, Horace set up a food distribution system and over the years
provided assistance to struggling farmers. Inspired by other Jesuit
trailblazers like John LaFarge and Richard McSorley, who worked in southern
Maryland at one time or another, Horace vigorously advocated for racial
integration in churches and schools.
Horace
could become impatient (a “passionate impatience,” Horace admitted) with a too-cautious
approach to racial integration. His zeal won him many friends and a fair number
of adversaries, even among his fellow Jesuits and priests who argued for a more
gradual approach to racial equality. With a blend of friendliness and righteous
persistence, Father McKenna always spoke his mind. After one tense, emotionally
raw town meeting, Horace approached a man in the hostile audience, extended his
hand and said, “I hope there are no hard feelings.” The man responded by
looking up at the rafters and saying, “There’s where you should be hanging
from.”
As
racial tensions continued to flare, Father McKenna was transferred in 1953 from
his beloved southern Maryland to St. Aloysius Church in the District of
Columbia. Except for a six-year stint at a parish in Philadelphia, Horace would
spend the rest of his life ministering just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. “It’s
the same work,” he said, “chasing sheep; except that the ground is harder.” The
St. Vincent de Paul Society office in the basement of the church became a
center for Horace’s charitable work.
Just as
he had driven around the counties of southern Maryland, Horace walked the
streets around the church, getting to know his neighbors by name. By the
mid-1960s, St. Al’s, once mostly white, had twice as many black parishioners as
white. The once residential neighborhood was changing. White families were
moving to the suburbs and office buildings were rising. The redevelopment
around North Capitol Street caused a shortage of affordable housing for the urban
poor. Responding to this need, Horace and his friends established a new housing
complex. They named it Sursum Corda, a Latin expression from the Mass that
means, “Lift up your hearts.”
Horace’s
work was ecumenical at its core: he partnered with other churches and served
anyone in need, regardless of their religion. In 1970, with the help of friends
at Georgetown and other religious leaders, Horace founded S.O.M.E. (So Others Might Eat), an
organization that provided hot meals to the hungry not far from St. Al’s.
Horace
could not turn away anyone needing help, including a man who gave his legal
address as “the back seat of Father McKenna’s car.” On one occasion, his car
was stolen. The thief was caught in West Virginia. When Horace arrived there to
retrieve the car, he refused to press charges and even gave the thief a ride
home to D.C. If asked, he gave away whatever money he had in his pocket. Father
McKenna did not hesitate to eat or sleep overnight in the city’s homeless
shelters, because he “wanted to see how my brothers in Christ are treated.”
On most
days, Horace amiably greeted people in the line that formed outside the church
basement. As Horace’s reputation for generosity grew, so did the line. Gonzaga
High School students, many of whom came from Washington’s affluent suburbs,
would walk by the line every day. One of those students was Martin O’Malley,
now governor of Maryland. He recently told The Washington Post: “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.”
Horace
was an avid fundraiser and communicated news of his work to well-connected
friends along the East Coast. He tried to educate the privileged about the
plight of the poor. Accolades and honorary degrees came his way. He courted
politicians in the name of the poor. With his charming personality, simplicity
of lifestyle and selfless zeal, Horace easily won over benefactors.
In the
late 1960s and 70s, marches and protests were common in the District of Columbia.
Horace walked down to the mall and befriended the protesters. He marched
against the Vietnam War. By the end of his life, as the nuclear arms race
continued unabated, Father McKenna described himself as a pacifist.
Amid all
his social work, Horace remained faithful to his ministry as a parish priest.
His prayer and preaching grounded his activism.
Celebrating
Mass was the center of his day. He earned a reputation as a succinct, engaging
homilist and as a wise, compassionate confessor. He called the confessional the
“peace box,” because people found peace there. A fellow priest commented, “He
was so close to the Lord that he could speak with authority and we could
reasonably believe that this was the divine word.”
Horace’s
most difficult time as a priest came in 1968, after Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae.
He publicly dissented from the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal O’Boyle, who
had issued guidelines for priests to apply the teaching prohibiting the use of
artificial birth control. Horace, who had great personal affection for the
cardinal, joined a group of priests in protesting a literal application of the
encyclical. Relying on more than 40 years experience hearing confessions,
Horace argued for some pastoral accommodation for married couples who as a
matter of conscience found the teaching unduly burdensome. Because of this
dissent, Cardinal O’Boyle, who had equal esteem for Horace, restricted him from
hearing confessions. Being kept from the “peace box” pained Horace deeply.
After two-and-a-half years of canonical appeals and personal pleas, Horace and
other dissenting priests expressed assent to a series of statements of
doctrine, after which O’Boyle restored their faculties to hear confessions.
As he
approached his 80th birthday, Horace encountered physical limits to his once
boundless activity. Though his mind remained sharp, he started to lose his
sight and needed help getting around. Talk of his saintly character grew. When
Washingtonian magazine named Horace a “Washingtonian of the year,” the editors
commented, “He is said to be the closest thing we have to a saint.” Mayor Barry
of Washington, D.C., declared July 15, 1979, “Horace McKenna Day” and named him
“Apostle of the Poor.” Governor Hughes of Maryland awarded Horace a special
citation for his service in southern Maryland. He was given his fourth honorary
degree, this time by Fordham University. Of his many honors, Horace treasured
most of all the celebration of his 50th anniversary as a priest, hosted by his
Jesuit brothers.
On May
11, 1982, Horace suffered a massive heart attack and died. Years earlier,
Horace had imagined what would happen after his death:
When God
lets me into heaven, I think I’ll ask to go off in a corner somewhere for half
an hour and sit down and cry because the strain is off, the work is done, and I
haven’t been unfaithful or disloyal, all these needs that I have known are in
the hands of Providence and I don’t have to worry any longer who’s at the door,
whose breadbox is empty, whose baby is sick, whose house is shaken and
discouraged, and whose children can’t read.
The
Church of St. Aloysius was packed for Horace’s funeral: rich and poor, black
and white, men and women from all walks of life. He was laid to rest in the
Jesuit cemetery on the Georgetown University campus, buried in a simple coffin,
befitting both his lifelong vow of poverty and his faithful accompaniment of
the poor.
Kevin
Gillespie, S.J., recalls an encounter with Horace one cold winter night just
months before he died. Kevin was a young Jesuit teaching at Gonzaga High
School. Father McKenna, partially blind and using a cane, asked Kevin to drive
him to a homeless shelter. “I want to be where Jesus is tonight,” Horace
explained. Arriving at the shelter, a group of men came out to greet them.
Kevin helped Horace get out of the car and entrusted him to the arms of the men
of the street who loved him as a father. They carefully led Horace into the
shelter, the door shutting behind them. Their saint had come home to them one
last time.
One
testament to a saintly life is the vigor with which the holy person’s work is
carried on. On the first anniversary of Horace’s death, Archbishop James Hickey
of Washington, D.C., dedicated the newly renovated basement of St. Al’s in
honor of Horace. The Father McKenna Center has since expanded to include a
small shelter for men. S.O.M.E. now offers food, clothing, health care, job
training and housing to thousands of people each year. Sursum Corda continues
to operate, but its future as publicly supported housing is precarious.
Horace’s old neighborhood is changing rapidly. The gentrification of the area
and development of more office buildings have further squeezed poorer families
out of the neighborhood.
To those
facing present-day challenges and opportunities, Horace would undoubtedly offer
his encouragement. During his lifetime, he would often interject at meetings a
question pertinent to those carrying on his mission today: “And what about the
poor?”
A
single-minded focus characterizes those special people we call “saints.” For
Horace, the focus was always the poor and powerless. In them, he glimpsed the
face of Christ; in them, he always found a home.
This
article also appeared in print, under the headline "Horace McKenna,
Apostle of the Poor," in the September 17, 2007 issue.
WORDS OF WISDOM
FROM FATHER HORACE MCKENNA
"I really believe that
every person is a revelation of God - the joy of God, the love of God. I feel
that the human person on the street is the appearance of Jesus Christ consumed
with human needs. Christ is in the wretched person, as well as the young
person, the young woman or the young child. Their smile is so fresh, like a bud
or an open flower that speaks of the wealth of the plant beneath the surface.
And that wealth is God. "
"You can't talk to a
person about his or her soul if that person has no food."
"In the old days, we would
go out in pairs and take care of the Widow Jones who had no bread or the Widow
Smith whose rent was due. But now, the poor are a swarm all around us. We can't
go out to them. How could you go to sixty homes? How could you go everywhere at
once? We have to be ready when they come to us."
"The greatest undeveloped
resource of our nation and of our world is the poor."
"The poor can't lift
themselves up by their bootstraps because they have no boots."
“When God lets me into heaven, I think I’ll ask to
go off in a corner somewhere for half an hour and sit down and cry because the
strain is off, the work is done, and I haven’t been unfaithful or disloyal, all
these needs that I have known are in the hands of Providence and I don’t have
to worry any longer who’s at the door, whose breadbox is empty, whose baby is
sick, whose house is shaken and discouraged, and whose children can’t
read."
