My impression of Main and East Hastings then was of a neighbourhood that had failed, with rampant homelessness and its accompanying mental health challenges and substance abuse on display for all to see. I have never been able to forget the woman in the alley, I could not tell if she was young or old, shooting drugs into her thigh with her torn sweatpants down around her ankles. Last week as I looked out the windows of the number 8 what I saw, as we meandered through the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was far worse.
What I had seen in 2004 had expanded and worsened with squalor and tortured humanity everywhere, boarded up stores, garbage and bodies lying everywhere. This is the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, and the failure of health care all wrapped up into one. These are not lifestyle choices on display. What I recognized as a failed neighbourhood in 2004 I now realized to be failed humanity. We have failed.
Ultimately the responsibility falls on all of us since government is us, but much more importantly the Church is us. How, as Catholics, should we approach this scandal? It is a failure of human community and so we must hold ourselves to a much higher standard of what is permissible in our neighbourhoods. Catholics can never accept that this is just how it is. The tragedy of the Downtown Eastside, or of Lowertown in Ottawa, does not have to continue.
His Eminence Cardinal Collins, in decrying our increasingly disordered understanding of the human person and our inherent dignity, characterized this failure by saying we have come to see individuals as 'whats', objects to be used, rather than as ‘whos’, subjects to be loved. When we see our fellow human beings merely as individuals and not as human persons like us made in the image and likeness of God, we are blind to the Incarnation and what Our Lord’s taking on human flesh demands of us. He gives us His very self by uniting the human and divine and dying and rising for our salvation, and this impels us to act. In acting we make His Incarnation and Glorious Resurrection ever more present in the world, including our corner of it.
Many good Christian organizations work hard with limited resources to mitigate this crisis. Vancouver’s Union Gospel Mission and Ottawa’s Shepherds of Good Hope come immediately to mind. Beyond volunteering, what more can I do? As I have argued before, now is the time perhaps more than ever for the Church to step into the breach and establish new, intensely local ministries that let us undertake corporate and spiritual works of mercy to those suffering so greatly.
Every parish can reach out to the local community and discern needs. A success in this regard is the street ministry of St. Mark and St. Monica’s Coptic Orthodox Church in Ottawa that supplies groceries and medicines to the poor. Another is Tenth Church in Vancouver’s Oasis Café where lower income people don’t line up and have a bowl of soup doled out but sit at intimate tables and are waited upon by volunteers at weekly lunches and dinners.
The knights and dames of the Order of Malta’s Hunger Patrol in downtown Toronto do what their forebears have done for 900 years.
Too often, we want a grand government program to solve everything. More often than not it has been Catholics and other Christians that have simply acted and fulfilled Our Lord’s call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Let us discern in our parishes the local needs; let us plan well; and then let us act and thus proclaim our faith in the Risen and Incarnate Lord.
St. Vincent de Paul and St. Teresa of Kolkata, pray for us!