The heart of charity

Insight on the News, Dec 25, 1995 by Michael Rust

Through investments of money and time, Americans continue to keep warm the health of private charity and personal compassion despite a widely perceived decline in traditional values and humane virtue.

The blustery wind of a cold December can't drown out the surprisingly strong peals of a bell at a downtown corner. The Salvation Army bell-ringer - standing guard over a bright red kettle and clad in a traditional "Major Barbara" uniform - is as much a part of Christmas Americana as a snow-covered New England landscape, the White House Christmas tree or a department-store Santa.

But the bell-ringer - strategically located to reach the maximum number of harried Christmas shoppers - is more than a picturesque part of the holiday season. This Christmas, 6 million Americans will rely on the Salvation Army for their Christmas celebration, and the organization - born in the flame of 19th-century evangelicalism - will provide for them, assisted by 1 million volunteers.

This is revealing. Even in the postmodern 1990s, a time when Americans voice increasing concern about a perceived decline in values and virtue; even after scandals of recent years implicated officials of the United Way in fraud; even as a media-soaked society grows more jaded with each click of a remote control, Americans still keep alive the fire of private charity and personal compassion through investments of money and time.

In Washington, this can have an ironic tinge. Among D.C.'s government and media elites, there was no doubt that the brief shutdown of the federal government in November was a "crisis." Yet, within several miles of the Capitol, the vortex of official Washington's self-important world, there are places in the federal city where crisis is a permanent condition.

Unlike government workers, who were reimbursed for their time off, "in the world we're in, there's no recovery for our people," Lt. Col. Clarence Harvey, the Salvation Army's national secretary for communication and development, tells Insight. "They just keep going back, back, back and back."

But volunteers continue to be there to greet them. They can be found at the Gospel Mission of Washington where the homeless receive material and spiritual sustenance within shouting distance of Congress, or perhaps at Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa's Gift of Peace house in Northeast Washington, or any one of a number of homes, refuges and missions where private citizens have volunteered to wage war against want and misery in the shadow of affluence and privilege.

There's nothing new about this. "You go back to colonial days, it's always been there," says Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion. But the ideological conflicts of recent decades have caused our heritage of personal charity to be downplayed, he suggests. "To justify the present, there has been a tendency of liberal historians to obscure and actually libel the past," he says. The idea is that "until the government got involved, Americans were a very cruel, mean-spirited people," Olasky tells Insight. "And that's not so at all. In fact, given the degrees of difficulty involved in a country that was much poorer than it is now, earlier Americans outshine us by several magnitudes of brightness."

And the brightness still can be seen. The Gift of Peace house is a hospice for homeless AIDS victims, modern lepers who "really have absolutely no other resources," says John Poppeliers, an international liaison officer for cultural resources with the National Park Service who volunteered there in the 1980s. "`It is the end of the line,' Mother Teresa said. You know, she ministers to the poorest of the poor," and knows what she is talking about.

Poppeliers, a member of the Third Order of Franciscans, a secular Catholic order, currently volunteers along with others of his community at Mt. Carmel House, a onetime Carmelite convent that now serves as a residence for homeless women. It is next to St. Mary's Catholic Church in the

Chinatown section of Washington, where drug abuse among the exhausted and terrified women occasionally requires police intervention. Not too far away on a once-fashionable stretch of Massachusetts Ave., in the handsome Victorian edifice housing the Episcopalian Church of Ascension and St. Agnes, Nancie Majkowski, a librarian at National Geographic, is coordinating the church's effort to deliver meals to the elderly. They're working with Emmaus House, which serves homebound senior citizens. The senior warden at the church asked her to come up with a program and "I prayerfully addressed this question," she tells Insight. Shortly thereafter, while perusing the comics page of the Washington Post, she saw a notice about Emmaus House and decided it is an answer to her prayer.

Such private charity affects the day-to-day life of virtually all Americans, although it seems to fly beneath the radar of media attention. Last year, the International Union of Gospel Missions, or IUGM, an association of more than 250 rescue missions in the United States and Canada, provided more than 27 million meals, 9 million beds and 13 million pieces of clothing to homeless men, women and children. In the course of one year, the Salvation Army serves around 9 million people through 6,000 units offering community centers, homes, camps and senior centers.