Street life memories...
...."Street Life" memories... These were my old stomping grounds which later became my first mission field. It was also my favorite song which I played to death on the juke box while playing pin-ball in the old "Sneakers" leather bar on West Street. That was years after the late Father Bruce Ritter, who never did any of us wrong, put me on a better path towards seminary. I was a "resistant vocation" who finally answered His call (first given to me at age five during Holy Mass) at age 21. But that was after I had stubbornly tasted and tried every other viable alternative.
Afterwards, it was the late 1970's and our interfaith "GOD SQUAD" * posse was just forming up. These glittering WTC Twin Towers (this old cobblestoned West St. perspective, long since gone, is my fondest focus of them) -- about a ten minutes stroll downtown from here -- were then just as young as my clerical vocation. Myself, I was a young, freshly tonsured seminarist then ministering to and socializing with the marginalized here by the Hudson River piers under the old elevated West Side Highway in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. I was them and they were me - still united in Spirit. Most have gone on, but none are forgotten.
Five years later, our loose association of like minded concerned clergy gathered into a private clerical association serving what was then being called the "GRID" ("Gay-Related Immune Deficiency") afflicted. In 1982, St. Anthony's Bread Mission Apostolate was organized as one of the first interfaith AIDS ministries serving clients in NY, NJ & PA. Some of our earliest clients were also RC clergy who were disowned by their communion -- just like the black Roman Catholic Bishop in NYC who was quietly shipped out of state as a common laborer to die from AIDS, which his chancery lied about. Despite their concerted efforts not to be exposed, truth prevails today.
Back then our focus was a common street-hospital-prison ministry to our suffering brethren. Today we are mainly an ecumenical ORCC covenant community which ever since I've continued to serve as pastoral moderator. Thankfully, migrant ministry often becomes our wider outreach. Clerical associates still worship in the field, at our various SABMA cenacles or within our domestic chapels. You'll be learning more about us here...
* 1.) Our SABMA "God Squad" first gathered on the NYC Waterfront in 1979. Our urban clients would post street-corner look outs to watch out for approaching "5-0" ("Adam 5-0" was then a popular TV cop show which influenced local street jargon). Bad boys and girls would scatter when "5-0" was shouted out. But when our "God Squad" of "undercover priests" (interfaith clerics often in street clothes) came in, they would all flock towards us. Besides being called the "holy trinity," which we detested, our late Deacon Frank Grant, the late Fr. Jerome "Bill" Janko, OSB and myself (none of us "oiled" yet) were "christened" with beer with that handle down on the dock strip. We objected to the latter, but agreed to wear the group moniker "God Squad" which has stuck ever since.
2.) Almost as ecumenical as our outfit, Rt. Rev. Msgr. Tom Hartman & Rabbi Marc Gellman (also on Long Island, NY) formed their more popular TV and lectern "God Squad" eight years later in 1987, "when Passover and Easter fell on the same day." Theirs is a dual, reformed class act. Not as intellectual or "classy", but just as sassy, our squad is earlier, street, broader and more inclusive.
posted by Fr. Steve @ Friday, June 25, 2004
0 comments
