People who are homeless line up for a hot meal outside Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington Dec. 16, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. The annual special collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development will be taken during Masses the weekend of Nov. 12-13 at most U.S. parishes. CCHD is the U.S. bishops' domestic anti-poverty program, and the collection coincides with the annual World Day of the Poor Nov. 13. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn) The bishops say more must be done on homelessness. Within days the reply arrives on the letters page of The Irish Times: give away your empty houses. Ber Grogan, executive director of the Simon Communities of Ireland, asks whether the bishops “would consider gifting those empty properties to their local authorities”. With nearly 18,000 people in emergency accommodation, she writes, “we need to start somewhere”.
We do. But as one commentator has pointed out, if Ms Grogan were serious, that somewhere would have been Maynooth, putting her idea to the bishops directly, not a performative letter to a paper whose favourite whipping boy is the Catholic Church.
The bishops’ 2018 pastoral letter, A Room at the Inn?, insisted that housing could not be left to the market. A homeless charity should welcome that voice. Instead, bizarrely the reflex is to attack.
Note that Ms Grogan is not attacking the banks the taxpayer bailed out, the investment funds buying up apartment blocks, the tech giants with their Dublin campuses and data centres to hand over their property. Simon says only the Church must strip its assets before it may speak.
Many will share the frustration Ms Grogan clearly feels. But she has worked in this field long enough to know that houses alone will not end homelessness. People also need addiction services, mental health care and support to stay housed. That makes it all the more surprising that someone of her experience, speaking for an established charity, should join the pile-on in The Irish Times.
A presbytery is not a bishop’s to give away. Under church law a parish’s goods belong to the parish, and its people in the main built them, paid for them and still maintain them, along with the church roof, the heating bill and the local Catholic school. As congregations and collections shrink, an empty parish house is often one of the few assets left to clear debts and keep the doors open.
For a Church trying to become synodal, the proposal is strikingly clericalist: Simon says let the bishops dispose of the people’s property over their heads. In a synodal Church, parishioners have a say in their parish’s future, and it should not be settled on the letters page of The Irish Times.
Sheltering the homeless is a corporal work of mercy, and Catholics were doing it long before the State took an interest. This year the Presentation Sisters mark 250 years since Nano Nagle founded them in Cork, when teaching poor Catholic children was against the law. She walked the city’s lanes by lantern light, nursing the sick and sheltering destitute women. Focus Ireland was founded by Sr Stanislaus Kennedy. The Peter McVerry Trust grew from a Jesuit’s prophetic work. Crosscare houses and supports people across Dublin. The Vincent de Paul is in almost every parish. Frank Duff’s Legion of Mary opened the Morning Star and Regina Coeli hostels nearly a century ago. We’ll take no lectures.
When the State decided to house tens of thousands of people fleeing the war in Ukraine, it found the buildings. Yet homelessness has hit record after record, despite more than €560 million of taxpayers’ money going to homeless services this year alone. Why?
Meanwhile vacant and derelict buildings line main streets across the country, and councils make patchy use of the derelict sites powers they already hold. Empty commercial units, State land and private land banks rarely feature in letters to the editor. The Church does, because it is visible, unfashionable and rarely answers back. Blaming it costs nothing and spares everyone in Simon and elsewhere the harder questions.
Secular Ireland has spent decades demanding the separation of Church and State. Fine. But separation runs both ways. The State cannot tell the Church to keep out of public life and then treat its property as a public reserve whenever housing policy fails.
Where a diocese or parish has genuine surplus property, it should be leased, sold or developed with approved housing bodies, and many already are. That is for the Church and its people to decide.
The game is up for deflecting all the woes of the country onto the Catholic community. If Simon want allies, they should welcome the bishops’ support, press the Government and the councils on the buildings they control and the laws they don’t enforce, and leave the presbyteries, halls and schools to the Catholic communities that built them.