Love and care are thicker than blood
15th June 2016 · 0 Comments
By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist
Nearly brimming over with 90 African-American youth aged 15 to 20, the decades-old gym reverberated with the cues and shouts of team members passing the basketball and driving on the goal in spirited pickup matches improvised on the spot. After a hotly-contested game, two adolescents approached their sponsor.
“Sit down, Brother Matt!” one youth boldly spoke up.
“Why are you giving orders to me?” Brother Matt countered. “I’m in charge.”
“Excuse me,” the youth corrected himself. “Please, Brother Matt. Sit down.”
As a very puzzled Brother Matt sat there, the youth came up respectfully two by two, extended their right hand and said, “Happy Father’s Day, Brother Matt!” It was, coincidentally, June 19, 1994, the same date as this Father’s Day of 2016.
Virtually moved to tears, Brother Matthew “Matt” Connors, S.V.D., realized that he was the only father in the lives of most of the young men sweating their way through the activity they enjoyed most in their lives so troubled at home, at school and on the streets. Worse, some were members of several gangs, but Brother Matt had forbidden them to carry any weapons or to wear their gang colors in the gym and on Sacred Heart Church grounds. Basketball-hungry, they grudgingly complied.
At first, staring one another down with patent hostility, the youngsters were very tentative in making their moves on the court, treating certain areas as if they were their own exclusive turf. Gradually, it became obvious to them that being on the opposing side on the court had an entirely different meaning from being part of a gang who were blood-sworn enemies of other gangs at all times and in all places.
The youngsters came to be so in tune with each other that they were able to self-police, relieving Brother Matt of the thankless task. Most meaningfully, there
was never a need for the local police to patrol the area, let alone look into the lively activities in the gym. This calm and peace among the youth came to the attention of the police and other authorities in town, notably the judges and court system. It was sufficient for Brother Matt to vouch for a young man in order to have him released. And there was no slipup and no recidivism. Every case had a happy ending. Police and judges wound up calling on Brother Matt before any other religious leader.
“You’re the only father I’ve ever known,” Matt was frequently told by various young men who came through his tutelage. “My own father walked out on me and wanted nothing to do with me.” “The difference with you is that you care,” was also a frequent observation. Another remarkable thing was that most of the youth were not even Catholic, underscoring that neither color, nor denomination nor condition meant anything to Brother Matt. All that counted was that these were all God’s children. This rang out loudly and clearly to every appreciative citizen living in the border west-central, deep delta city of historic Greenville, Mississippi.
“Many of the townspeople feared that one day some of the young men would turn on me and kill me,” Brother Matt recounted. “But I never had the slightest fear of any of them. However, I kept wondering why they always stayed very close to me under certain conditions. So one day I asked them why they did that.”
“There are times when we need to protect you from stray bullets when cars are passing by. We will knock you down, cover you and take the bullets for you!”
“The only sad remembrance I have of my stay in Greenville is that I oversaw 75 funerals of young men. Those were lives wasted by senseless violence.”
To counter in part the readiness of guns in the hands of youth, Brother Matt requested amnesty – no names and no arrests – on the part of the police if he collected guns from the local young men. Moved by this, 71 youth turned in guns.
“To this day, now grown men with wives and children call me from around the country to wish me a Happy Father’s Day or just to stay in touch. Off and on, some drop by to visit me here at St. Augustine Residence in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. They have settled down with their wives and children and have gainful employment. I could not have a more satisfied feeling of fulfillment about my youth ministry.”
Rival gangs in Greenville assembled in 1994 and cobbled together a peace agreement that is still standing firm today. They have fashioned a working model that can be used in other cities. Why are municipal authorities, especially in our big cities, not trying to devise and implement a similar template for peace? Does law enforcement consider hard-core gangs beyond any hope of redemption?
This article originally published in the June 13, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
