Mahoney: St. Patrick soul food from Father Tony

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Mahoney: St. Patrick soul food from Father Tony

Most Hamiltonians, unless very religious or very Irish, think of St. Patrick once a year, after the Ides of March, in a merriment of green beer and shamrock-shaped eyeglasses.

Many of our homeless, poor and marginalized think of St. Patrick all the time. The King Street East and Victoria Avenue South church bearing his name feeds up to 300 every day at its De Mazenod Door.

How did this come to pass? Meet Father Tony O’Dell, being honoured on the blessed day of March 17 by Hamilton’s Wearing of the Green as 2017 Irish Person of the Year.

He, with much help from parishioners and former co-pastor Father Jarek Pachocki, has spearheaded the revival of one of Hamilton’s most historic Catholic parishes, once the spiritual and cultural cradle of the city’s Irish Corktown community.

Every day — not once a month, or once a week — people line up, droves of them, and the food appears like loaves and fish, plentiful and seemingly out of the blue. Not a miracle but a prodigious achievement nonetheless, wonder in a world of wonders, and while the effort might seem herculean — oops, wrong divinity system — um, supernatural, it’s not supernatural so much as second nature, to Father Tony’s team. The milk of human kindness.

It’s all happened in an astonishingly short time. Five years ago, Father Tony was new here, having been conjured from Labrador City and, before that, West Saint Modeste, Labrador, population 50, by Bishop Douglas Crosby.

“When I got here,” Father Tony tells me of his introduction to this community, huddled around St. Patrick’s Church, “I just drove around and around. I didn’t want to get out of the car.” He was scared, he says, only half joking.

“There was a fence around the whole church, and flower beds with no flowers.” The fence, he knew in an instant, would have to go. Go it did, along with the separation it symbolized. Now street spills into church and church into street in a dynamic symbiosis.

“This is the liveliest parish in Hamilton,” says Ed Cummings of the Wearing of the Green committee, who knows everything about this city. He joins me with Father Tony on a Friday barbecue, with a March wind blowing the delicious smells around the block like an invocation. Children and teachers from adjoining St. Patrick’s School help serve.

Father Tony calls it resetting the walls of the church, taking it out beyond itself.

This comes across, again symbolically, in the homeless Jesus (sculpture) sleeping on a bench on the sidewalk. The church’s very God, on the street. It’s a purity, so opposite to what some larger cities have done — benches deliberately too small to sleep on. Sad.

“There were panhandlers all up and down,” Father Tony says of his first impressions. And prostitution. He’s been propositioned in parking lots — the priestly collar no deterrent to the come-ons. “There’s not a day goes by without something out of the ordinary. You have to have a sense of humour; laugh at yourself.”

Father Tony sits you down and out come the stories, the down-home manner, direct speech, the warmth and humour. “We’re trying to help people rediscover their own sense of value,” he says. There’s an open gym in the church.

Father Tony weaves through these corridors, sometimes followed by church dogs TJ and Sutton, through the offices and streets beyond, as freely as the wind, one that goes around walls, blows down fences and breathes new life into things. There are flowers now in the flower beds … or will be, come spring.

There are people now who’ve basically given up long-awaited retirements, to volunteer here, often full-time, such is the fervour Father Tony inspires.

It could’ve been different. Before Father Tony came he was being considered to run the Catholic retreat centre in Edmonton. But he’s an Oblate priest, devoted to the marginalized. He knew where his road led.

Home, where it’s St Patrick’s every day, the door — and the kitchen — always open to the best and least — both in the being of each one — among us.

Published on Wednesday, March 8, 2017 in the Hamilton Spectator

By Jeff Mahoney, The Hamilton Spectator