On the morning Pope John Paul II was winging his way to the U.S., a notable member of his flock was lined up at a downtown Budget-Rent-A-Car office.
“Are you Father Clements?” I asked to the only other 7:45 a.m. Budget customer.
“Yes,” replied Rev. George Clements.
“Well, what are you doing here in Washington?” I continued (keeping to myself the inevitable query as to whether there are special Vatican rates on Hyundais or Mustangs).
The answer is that the tough-minded and controversial South Side minister is alive, well and a full-time capital resident with a new mission he has tagged: “One Church-One Addict.”
“I was born in Chicago, raised there, and all my assignments were there,” he said the next day during a chat. “It is, as Sinatra sings, my kind of town. I miss the ambience, the people, my sons, my parishioners. I miss (Mayor Richard M.) Daley. We’re friends, though I was an enemy of his father.
“But there was a need to leave because the church all over this nation just had to be involved in this struggle over addiction, and I felt I could have more impact from here.”
Clements, a robust 63, spent 26 years at Holy Angels Catholic Church, 607 E. Oakwood Blvd., rankling political and church establishments. He fought illegal drugs and oversaw the nation’s largest black Catholic elementary school (also called Holy Angels) and pressed for adoptions via his “One Church-One Child” program.
The program found church families to adopt black children-as he himself did four times. A TV movie was made about his life.
This former chaplain for the Black Panthers was quite the black power advocate, but one who insisted on discipline, work and accountability.
A mix of doctrinal traditionalist and activist black clergyman, he stunned Holy Angels parishioners when he took over in 1969. No longer would he accept the $100,000 in annual archdiocese subsidies to keep afloat. The church would be self-reliant or die.
He stepped down as boss in 1991-years later than planned because of a 1986 fire that destroyed the church and prompted vigorous fundraising to build a new one.
In 1993 he split to a small Caribbean parish for a sabbatical and then came to Washington, moving in with an elderly aunt. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he began a drug-addiction counterpart to his adopt-a-black-child program; it claims 700 churches in 30 states that are each aiding at least one recovering addict.
“I felt keenly that there were many institutions mobilized on the problem of addiction, but one that was not really involved was the church,” he said from a small, austere office, rented from a public interest group called the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities and a stone’s throw from a stretch of lobbyists’ and lawyers’ offices labeled “Gucci Gulch.”
“If Jesus Christ were walking around today, he’d be involved with substance abuse. Addicts are the modern-day lepers.”
As for the visiting head honcho from Rome, the pope is for Clements “the most exemplary pontiff we have ever had.”
“I deeply respect and admire him. He has taken tough, principled stands. Personally, I will always be grateful that he allowed me to adopt over the objections of Cody,” he said, speaking of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s late predecessor, the authoritarian Cardinal John Cody.
Polls suggest a dichotomy in American Catholics’ feelings toward the pope. They think he’s fulfilling his duties well, but disagree with him sharply on abortion, celibacy for priests and ordination of women, among other issues.
Clements is opposed to birth control. “Frequently, it’s aimed at minorities. People don’t say, `There are too many Kennedys.’ They say, `There are too many black kids.’ “
On celibacy, he thinks the priesthood has been successful because of the stricture. He takes the traditional line, that it forces one not to divide one’s attention between work and family, although he hedges by saying he would not be totally chagrined if a change ever came.
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He also supports the ban on the ordination of women as priests, “though there’s nothing in divine law that would prohibit it. I personally think it would be a good thing, but when you join an organization, you follow their rules.”
The pope came to a nation that he’s bashed for exporting a “culture of death.” Clements agrees.
He ticked off the rise in abortions; high homicide rates; what he deems a tradition of genocide, including against the American Indian; and the stockpiling of nuclear arms.
“It’s ridiculous to call these (gansta) rappers violent” when we have the capability of blowing the planet to smithereens, he said.
Fine. But what about his own organization’s failure to recruit a new generation of followers, especially a new cadre of priests?
“Why should a young man enter when so many priests are ambivalent about what they’re doing? Who wants to get involved in an organization with so many sourpusses?
“We need priests who show that they are fine with what they’re doing and not reluctant to go out and wear the Roman collar.”
As he proudly wears his collar, he is technically a loaner. He remains a priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, here with the approval of Bernardin “until further notice.”
Clements returns to Chicago twice a month and sees sons Friday, 26, and Stewart, 25, who have jobs as an investigator and clerk, respectively, in the Cook County court system. Joseph, 27, works with poor kids in Knoxville, and Saint Anthony, 23, plays pro basketball in New Zealand.
But they’re really no more than a phone call away. And they do call.
“None of them is married,” said Clements with a grin. “I am in touch with them . . . too often.”
Frat backer
The following is depressingly true:
Rep. Robert Livingston (R-La.), high-handed chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee, has sent a most remarkable letter to the presidents of Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury and Hamilton Colleges.
He complains about the schools’ taking actions against single-sex fraternities, such as Delta Kappa Epsilon, of which he was a member at Tulane University.
He asserts that, “As the beneficiary of significant federal funding, one would think you would be sensitive to the bedrock principles of Freedom of Association and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Limiting free speech and freedom of association on your campus with a federal taxpayer subsidy should be avoided at all costs.”
It’s a bonehead threat to yank federal monies.
The congressman might be best off finding a keg of beer and some alumni bro, and to then run up the Capitol steps flapping his arms and shouting, “Toga! Toga!”
3 for the cities
The National League of Cities, advocacy and lobbying arm of cities and towns, will hold its annual meeting in Phoenix next month. More than 4,000 government officials will attend.
A spokesman confirms that the pols will pay National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg, NBC’s Bryant Gumbel and ABC’s Carole Simpson to moderate separate panel discussions (and do so, says the itinerary, “in a talk show format”).
Wrong verdict
The press release of the week came from Northwestern University, just hours before the verdict in a Los Angeles criminal case:
“CHICAGO-Ronald J. Allen, the John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and a leading scholar on evidence and juries, has consistently said that the jury would find O.J. Simpson guilty when many other legal experts were saying just the opposite. . . .”
Hey, Geraldo goofed too.