“I haven’t seen you in 15 months! How are you?”

I am thankful to have heard that multiple times in recent weeks, and I am really starting to feel like I’m “back.” We’re not out of the woods with COVID-19 just yet, but I am thrilled to be in our Catholic Charities’ offices on G Street in Washington, D.C., at least two and often three days a week, working the other days from the rectory at St. Bart’s in Bethesda. 

It feels great to see our staff in person, watch our programs develop, and talk face-to-face with our clients. Technology has done wonders to keep us connected during the pandemic, but there is no substitute for looking someone in the eye if you want to treat them with the dignity they deserve. 

I also recognize with even greater clarity that incredible work Catholic Charities does throughout the year. In recent weeks, I have toured a few of our programs on the front lines of what we do, and it is so uplifting to again be able to see these great efforts firsthand.

One of those tours was our Newcomer Network. Sister Sharlet Wagner, one of the newer members of our staff, is leading a brand-new effort to reach out to all who come here from other places and need legal support and other assistance acclimating them to their new home. We are thrilled to have two parishes where this program is beginning to take shape – St. Bernard’s in Riverdale Park and St. Camillus in Silver Spring. 

This is an area of great need. Even with a hotline set up to operate 20 hours a week, there are days where many people cannot get through to one of our staff members who can communicate effectively in the client’s native language. We are seeing a lot of early success in this exciting program. Thanks to the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, we are making great progress in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. 

I also had the opportunity to visit a few of our shelters recently. The first was Mulumba House on Rhode Island Avenue in the District. In the time since COVID started, we have turned the first floor of that building into a place to welcome home citizens recently released from incarceration. Half of the 30-plus beds at Mulumba House are now for those who have finished serving their sentences.

They are excited to be released and often need help getting settled. They want to look for jobs and make every effort to become productive citizens once again. Sadly, many are not welcomed back at first by their families and have very little support. Catholic Charities provides that support, and both the program and its leadership are exceptional. It is great to see what can happen when a program is targeted to a particular need. 

I also got to visit a new program called PEP-V, which is the abbreviation for Pandemic Emergency Program for Medically Vulnerable Individuals. This is a newer program for people who are older, have spent a long time in shelters and have medical concerns. With the city’s help, they have been transferred from a shelter to a hotel room where they can live alone. We currently have about 140 people in the Hotel Arboretum and another 140 in the Fairfield Inn, both at Bladensburg Road and New York Avenue in Northeast Washington. 

This has been one of my dreams for years. We have too many people who have been in shelters for too long, unable to extricate themselves from difficult situations. They don’t belong in a shelter because of their age, and they don’t belong in a shelter because of their health issues. The city is doing its very best to help, and Catholic Charities happily provides the caseworkers and social workers to try to help them move from poverty to sustainability.  

We are excited about the possibilities for the future, but the program could end when COVID is finally behind us for good. We are lobbying hard to keep it going, as it is clearly a more dignified and respectful way to provide housing to older individuals with medical conditions than warehousing them in a big shelter with little chance for change. 

Along those same lines, I am excited about a new shelter being built at our St. Elizabeth’s campus. We will close an older, dilapidated building and move into a new space a few hundred yards away. This shelter will be unique in that clients will be served according to their specific situations. For instance, veterans will have one wing, those struggling with mental health issues will have another wing, and so on. It will be a real blessing to group people by their needs, allowing our caseworkers to meet those needs more specifically. 

It’s great to be back enjoying the friendship of staff and clients and seeing firsthand the miracles of love and charity brought about by those committed to serving the poor. In some ways, the pandemic opened a few doors for us and sparked creative new solutions for longstanding problems. Walking through those doors are the people we serve, who need not a handout but a hand up to improve their lives. 

We’re doing it one by one, day by day, all throughout the year. 

(Msgr. John Enzler, the president and CEO of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Washington, writes the “Faith in Action” column for the archdiocese’s Catholic Standard and Spanish-language El Pregonero newspapers and websites.)