She dares to mess with systems of injustice

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 10, 1995 by Sharon Abercrombie

SAN FRANCISCO -- A sign hanging above Sr. Bernie Galvin's desk says it all. "If you're going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance."

For much of her religious life, the 62-year-old Sister of Divine Providence h;as been doing just that. So what does it look like, to have embraced dancing on thin ice" as your ministry? For Galvin, it has meant getting arrested 24 times for civil disobedience.

Since 1969, first as a school principal and later as a community and labor organizer, she has hammered away at the consciences of white, Southern parents, sugar plantation bosses, textile factory owners, police, powerful businesspeople and mayors.

Through it all, Galvin has calmly withstood the rancor that automatically accompanies, in her words, "messing around' with entrenched systems of injustice -- racism, dangerous working conditions and, lately, homeless issues.

Once in Louisiana when an anonymous caller threatened to burn down her house for organizing sugar cane mill workers, Galvin said to a colleague, I guess I'll just have to wear asbestos pajamas." And continued her work.

"I have never run away from anything. the slender nun said recently during an interview in her Tenderloin area office. Standing fast may have something to do with her childhood, she reflected. The Galvins were poor, working-class people in the little town of Vinita, Okla. Galvin was the third-oldest child in a family of 13. Her dad was a plumber. We were union and Catholic,' she said proudly.

That combination apparently created an underpinning for her later work.

Today, Galvin's fearlessness has endeared her as a friend to many of San Francisco's 12,000 homeless people. Two years ago, she founded the Religious Witness with Homeless People, an ecumenical coalition of 2,300 priests, rabbis, nuns, ministers and laypeople. They periodically participate in public prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience to call attention to the plight of the Bay Area's street people.

Galvin organized Religious Witness as a response to Matrix, a program initiated by Mayor Frank Jordan in August 1993. Matrix gives police authority to issue citations and arrest homeless people for their state in life,' said Galvin. Since Matrix, there have been 25,000 citations and arrests.

In recent weeks, Jordan created Matrix H, a ruling that makes it illegal to camp in the parks. His action comes at a time in San Francisco!s history when parks are now the only places where poor people can find a legal place "to rest or sleep or live." Police actions have driven homeless people further and farther away from the downtown areas, Galvin said.

San Francisco as 1,400 beds for its 12,000 homeless population and 700 hotel rooms for the 3,000 homeless persons on General Assistance, she explained. Rather than creating job-training programs, low-cost housing and treatment programs to help its impoverished citizens, the city of St. Francis' leadership seems intent instead on "driving them into the ocean," said Galvin.

If that should happen, Galvin and some of her supporters will be there with them. On Oct. 5, a group of 50 people risked arrest for camping out with homeless people in Golden Gate Park. Unlike an earlier protest, this night passed uneventfully. Some speculate that Jordan, up for reelection in November, does not want to confront the Religious Witness group head-on.

What causes a school principal to step out and take such risks?

"A tug at my heart. Each time, it comes very gently and then it gets stronger,' Galvin said recently, an Oklahoma twang curling gently around the edges of her words.

The first time she experienced the tug was in Broussand, La., a sugar plantation town. It was 1969, and my heart was gripped by the harsh reality of the plantation system,' she said. Mere was a mg division between the white growers and the black mill and field workers. They and their children lived in abject poverty."

The black children did not attend parochial school. So one year into her tenure as principal, Galvin opened admission to them. "It was not a popular' decision," she recalls.

Anger aside, the tug at her heart continued. As she bettered the educational lives of the children, she realized something also needed to be done to change the harsh social, economic and political systems that dominated their parents' existence.

In her spare time, she began doing home visits, listening to people's stories. After four years, Galvin resigned to work full time as a union organizer, with the blessings of her religious community, which has continued to financially support her work.

Common sense guided her transition from education to union organizing, which, she said, she "learned by doing. I listened to the wisdom of the workers. Together we made it happen."

Seven years later, Galvin felt a familiar tug at her heart. This time, it told her she needed to move to South Carolina and help textile workers in their battles with J.P. Stevens.

One day, she and a Divine Providence colleague, Sr. Imelda Maurer, packed their possessions into a Chevrolet and headed for South Carolina. They went incognito, as simply two women looking for work. "We'd stop at restaurants along the way and ask where the jobs were." People pointed them toward Greenville -- "right into the belly of the beast itself."