Photo by Ed Yourdon on Flickr.

Washington, DC is a tale of two cities, one for the powerful and the other for the powerless. From the front steps of Saint Aloysius Church you can look to your right and see the US Capitol Dome and then look to your left to see one of the poorest zip codes in the District.

Closing the gap between the realities of wealth and power on one hand and dire need on the other is a task for caring people and especially an imperative of my faith.

The Father McKenna Center, where I work, carries on the work of the late Fr. Horace B. McKenna who was known as the “priest to the poor”. Horace McKenna used to say that his role was to hang on to people until help came. Our role is similar to that. We help the poor and homeless. We serve both men and women.

There is no doubt that the recession has had a great impact on the poor. A year or so ago, 143 households came to the McKenna Center each month seeking food from our pantry. Our “customers,” if you will, were often mothers with children and elderly men and women from the neighborhood. At present we are seeing about 188 households coming for food. Five years ago, we saw 68 men per day at our daytime drop in center. For the last three years, the number has been over 100 men per day.

When the door opens on a weekday morning at 8 AM and our guests sign in we hope that our welcome sends a message to the men that we care about them. Throughout their stay with us they will hear us urge them to take a positive step in their lives to deal with their physical and mental health, look for work or improve their education and break the hold that alcohol and drugs have on so many homeless men.

It is relatively easy to provide a bowl of cereal in the morning and lunch at noon, to wash a man’s clothes and provide him with a shower. The more difficult task is to sensitively inquire about why a man is homeless, what can we do to help him overcome his situation and what can he do for himself that will move him forward. The more interventions we do with individual homeless men the more the mental health needs of the homeless population become apparent. It is not that homeless men are crazy but that they are in many cases deeply depressed and resigned to the homeless deathstyle.

The messages we try to give our guests do not come in a vacuum. They are receiving many messages every day and our message is only one of them. What does it say to a homeless man who sleeps at the 801 East Shelter at Saint Elizabeth’s when he realizes that there is one case manager at 801 for all 380 men who sleep there? It is hard to imagine that it says, “We care about you”. Placing shelters far outside the mainstream of the city tells the homeless that we want them to go away.

Poverty is at the core of the homeless problem, a most complex problem. All too often we hear homeless men say that they never knew their fathers. They often had one strike against them before they could learn to talk. They often came to value the quick buck over the pains and sorrows of education. The allure of the quick buck got them involved in drugs that often led to prison. Many suffer from obvious mental illness while most suffer from mental illness that is not so obvious.

There is no simple one size fits all solution to homelessness but a solution begins with compassion that literally means “to suffer with”. We can do better by the homeless and the homeless can do better for themselves so we have to work together.

Tom Howarth is the Director of The Father McKenna Center. Cross-posted at Defeat Poverty DC.