Staying Focused on Mission During Challenging Times

From Dan Conway’s The Good Steward, April 2009

“In his pastoral letter The Church Sharing!, Bishop David A. Zubik reflects on a story of Pittsburgh during the Great Depression:

A long time ago – nearly 80 years ago, during the first years of the Great Depression – people in Pittsburgh were out of work, kids were going hungry, the elderly were being forgotten. It was a time when hope had almost disappeared, and men and women viewed their world with quiet desperation as all the old certainties were falling apart; the job at the mill, food on the table, a decent place to live, a plan for the future. All these good things that only a few years before had been the expectation when a person faced a new day were no longer there. They held onto their faith in God, but it was hard to have faith in anything else.

And then came another tragedy in a Pittsburgh community that seemed to have no heart for any more tragedies. On July 24, 1931, just an hour after everyone had gone to sleep, fire broke out at a home for the needy elderly people operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor on Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville. Forty-nine of the elderly poor would be killed by that fire, another 175 injured.

The city was shocked by the horror of it all. In too many ways, it summed up the tragedy of the Depression itself. Innocent victims consumed by something that they didn’t understand, couldn’t control, hadn’t caused …”

– Read the full article –