What are we to do with the homeless in our midst? As Catholics, we are no doubt mindful of Christ’s repeated injunctions to care for the destitute — to share your spare garment with “him who has none” (Luke 3:11), to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” (Luke 14:13).  

This call to charity is clear. And yet: In the past few years, unchecked homelessness has increasingly come to be seen as a blight on our communities — not without cause. Encampments, public drug use, and a homeless population suffering visibly from mental illness pose threats to public safety, sanitation and commerce. Are we called simply to open our doors unconditionally to such hazards?  

This question of how Catholics ought to respond to America’s mounting homelessness crisis was thrown into sharp relief by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. The Court ruled that towns can “clear” homeless encampments — and even apply civil and criminal penalties for camping homeless on public land — without having to provide alternative housing. Some have criticized the Grants Pass decision as cruelly “criminalizing” homelessness. Others see it as a necessary step towards restoring law and order. So, what is our duty to the destitute?  

As the president of the National Council of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, I believe that the Grants Pass decision will neither solve nor worsen the current crisis. Neither stricter policing nor more lenient laws addresses the roots of homelessness. Instead, we can best respond to Christ’s call to care for those most in need by focusing on homelessness prevention, for reasons I will explain.  

To understand why prevention programs are so critically needed, we must first understand why so many people are becoming homeless. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the number of Americans experiencing homelessness has risen almost 50% over the past eight years. 12 million people are “severely cost-burdened,” and thus at risk of becoming homeless themselves. That massive increase can’t be attributed to drugs or mental illness (even if those ills affect the most visibly homeless). Instead, its main drivers are brute economic factors like skyrocketing housing costs and inflation. “A great river of poverty is traversing our cities and swelling to the point of overflowing,” Pope Francis said in his 2023 message for the World Day of the Poor. “It seems to overwhelm us, so great are the needs of our brothers and sisters who plead for our help, support and solidarity.”  

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul (SVdP) works alongside these poor and marginalized in more than 1,000 cities in America. In that work, we consistently find that the people most often on the brink of homelessness are single-parent families: a parent or grandparent trying desperately to juggle childcare with keeping a roof overhead. One car wreck, hospital stay or layoff can dislodge a family from a home and put them out on the streets. These people aren’t irresponsible “free riders” looking for a handout; they’re our fellow children of God in need of mercy.  

Once we understand that, we immediately see that what people in need really need is not transactional but relational charity — not alms so much as a personal encounter that communicates Christ’s love by responding to the particulars of their situation. As Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, once said: “It is our vocation to set people’s hearts ablaze, to do what the Son of God did, who came to light a fire on earth in order to set it ablaze with His love.”  

Homelessness-prevention programs offer a powerful means of carrying out this Christian, relational charity. These programs typically involve home visits, personalized resources, engagement with landlords, crafting a “Stability Plan,” and financial assistance in making rent and paying utilities. Such personalized, flexible assistance can save struggling families and individuals from losing their homes and entering the homelessness system in the first place.  

Homelessness-prevention programs thus honor the dignity of the human person: They don’t wait until someone is begging in the street or looking for a bed to sleep in. They also work. According to a recent study conducted by Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), persons who received an average of $2,000 in emergency financial assistance were “81 percent less likely to become homeless within six months of enrollment and 73 percent less likely within 12 months.”  

In his World Day of the Poor message in 2017, Pope Francis wrote: “We may think of the poor simply as the beneficiaries of our occasional volunteer work, or of impromptu acts of generosity that appease our conscience. However good and useful such acts may be for making us sensitive to people’s needs and the injustices that are often their cause, they ought to lead to a true encounter with the poor and a sharing that becomes a way of life.” 

That spiritual encounter touches us. It enriches us. It is a shared encounter. It's a wonderful thing to encounter your neighbor in need, not in the unequal relation of beggar to benefactor but rather as one person helping another to grow. I discovered this for myself as a volunteer with St. Vincent de Paul many years ago. I’d been helping out at a homeless shelter when I was offered the opportunity to teach a basic computer-skills class once a week. I loved it! It was more than showing charity through an act of service; it was helping equip people to advance and succeed. (Little did I realize, at the time, that Our Lord was also planting seeds that would grow, in spite of my own stubborn plans, into 20-plus years of leadership with SVdP at the state and national level.)  

One of the most powerful memories of my time teaching that class was almost a year later, when I came home from work one day and found a flyer for a cleaning service in my mailbox. I was about to throw it away when I noticed the name of the contact person. Her name rang a bell, and then it rang a gong! She was one of the people I had taught. I called her, and she told me she had a thriving business cleaning houses and was about to hire another person to help. She had designed and printed the flyer herself and was tracking her business on her computer. At the time she had come to our class, she didn’t even know how to turn a computer on. After I hung up, I cried tears of joy. This was what God calls us to do. This one act of lifting someone up by providing them skills and self-confidence had prevented them from falling into the despair of hopelessness and homelessness. 

 Homelessness-prevention programs are grounded in the person-to-person encounter. Precarious living situations don’t fit neatly into bureaucratic boxes. And impersonal administrations adds layers of complexity to application processes that serve to deter the very people who need help the most. Prevention programs succeed insofar as they are personal and flexible: personally administered and rooted in Christian charity; and flexible in the assistance they offer — whether it’s repairing a car, paying a utility bill, or working directly with a landlord to keep eviction off the table. In this respect, homelessness-prevention programs exemplify the principle of subsidiarity, so central to Catholic social teaching, in that they are fundamentally local responses.  

No, prevention programs don’t address the many and acute needs of those poor souls in the encampments that have proliferated across America. But these temporary assistance programs work — and produce profound and long-lasting effects when communities implement them in a spirit of Christian charity and subsidiarity. So as City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson reminds us of the severity of our homelessness crisis, we must work together to restore stability and dignity to neighbors living on the edge of homelessness. 

 

John Berry is the president of the National Council of the United States of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a 90,000-member faith-based volunteer organization that provides support to people in need at more than 4,000 locations in the United States.