The Cleric of Covenant House : Impatient as Ever, Father Bruce Ritter Battles Critics to Bring His Shelter Empire to L.A.

“And then there are the unsung heroes . . . . A person like Father Bruce Ritter is always there. His Covenant House programs . . . provide shelter and help to thousands of frightened and abused children each year.”

--President Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, 1984

Father Bruce Ritter is not exactly unsung. On Tuesday, for example, he will be standing next to President George Bush in the White House accepting a Presidential Volunteer Action award on behalf of his Covenant House volunteers.

The singing, however, is not always that of one chorus in harmony. Most recently in Los Angeles, where Ritter has brought his Covenant House concept, the reaction to him has come close to cacophony. The mild-mannered, outspoken Franciscan priest who answered a knock on his door one night 20 years ago and gave shelter to six New York street kids has become a controversial figure.

Among charges frequently heard are that Ritter’s Covenant House programs are too big to be adequately supervised, that Covenant House’s well-oiled media and fund-raising approach frequently elbows out smaller programs--and is a reflection of Ritter’s steadily enlarging ego--and that the program’s philosophy of never turning a young person away is actually poor social work.

Ritter, who started his priestly life as a professor of medieval theology, is not a trained social worker. “Nothing I learned about the 14th Century prepared me for what I do now,” he said. That lack of preparation, he acknowledges, is probably what made him get started in the first place. Not knowing about bureaucratic procedures, regulations and accepted theories, he ignored them.

He likes at times to paint himself as a sort of rube, ascribing some of the disagreement over his methods and motives to what he calls his political ineptitude. Other than that he explains it unapologetically: “If the corporate culture of an organization comes from the top, in a way what’s embedded in Covenant House is a benign disregard of the status quo. We often bump our heads on that.”

Perhaps because of a gift for public relations that seems innate, Ritter easily incorporates what is in vogue. Typically, he speaks of an upcoming trip to Manila and Bangkok as exploring the possibility of bringing Covenant House to the Pacific Rim.

The Pacific Rim is a long way from 1969, when Ritter began feeding and sheltering kids in his East Village apartment. He founded Covenant House as a licensed child-care agency in 1972, and by 1977 was in the Times Square area operating a 24-hour crisis shelter offering comprehensive services for street youth under 21. Later he began “Rights of Passage,” a long-term residence program where those so motivated can begin the transition back to the mainstream.

Today there are Covenant Houses in Toronto, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, New Orleans, Anchorage, and several in Central America, all following the same model.

And if not quite a household word, Bruce Ritter is certainly known to the 650,000 households on his mailing list. His extraordinarily successful direct mail fund-raising brings in much of the $60 million annual budget for Covenant House’s worldwide operations.

Although the organization has a paid nationwide staff of more than 1,000 and about 300 volunteers, supporters and detractors alike speak of Ritter and Covenant House almost interchangeably. They call Covenant House a haven, or a franchise operation (“McRunaway” as the Philadelphia Inquirer once called it). They describe it as a desperately needed service, or question the whole operation as a monument to Ritter’s ego. Whatever it is, they tend to see it as Bruce Ritter’s operation, one where he calls the shots and sets the tone.

New York’s Mayor Ed Koch crossed swords with him publicly in 1987 when Ritter outbid the city, $33 million to $30 million, on a building Koch wanted for housing work-release prisoners. He accused Ritter of “dirty pool” and breaking the Golden Rule, then made peace and showed up for the building’s dedication as Chelsea House, a 300-bed residence. Koch shrugged off the contretemps with a cheerful, “Never fool around with a priest. He’ll always win.”

In Boston, Covenant House was briefly established and then abandoned. Most attribute the departure to lack of support from the archdiocese and local opposition from smaller youth programs. Sister Barbara Whelan, director of Bridge Over Troubled Waters there, mirrored the comments of some others who criticize him, saying Covenant House shelters are too big to provide quality service, that the whole operation has become too media conscious and glitzy, that it frequently threatens the financial survival of smaller local programs, inadvertently forcing some to close, and that it comes on as the only game in town, arrogantly refusing to network.

Acknowledging that she had little personal contact with Ritter, Whelan described the Covenant House modus operandi, predicting it would be played out in Los Angeles: “They come in. They know what they’re going to do and they do it. They have the money to do it. Money talks to politicians.”

Covenant House does appear to have friends in high places.

When--after two years of “needs assessment”--plans were announced last December to open a 100-bed shelter in Hollywood, it was former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, a Covenant House national board member, who made the announcement at a Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

That announcement had been preceded in May by a quiet, low-key statement from Los Angeles-based Bettingen Corp., that Covenant House was being awarded $4 million, plus another $1 million matching-funds grant, to buy property and build a Los Angeles crisis center offering comprehensive services to runaways and street children.

For a welcoming reception sponsored by the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce, which is sponsoring Covenant House’s outreach van program here, Home Box Office lent its reception and screening rooms at Century City; Nordstrom provided the refreshments.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich arranged for the County Board of Supervisors to welcome Covenant House to Los Angeles and, in a photo opportunity session at the Hall of Administration, presented Ritter with a scroll proclaiming last Jan. 30 “Father Bruce Ritter Day.” “We’ll spend $35 million here. None of those will be tax dollars,” Ritter told the supervisors in accepting the scroll, which has since been framed and is prominently displayed in a Covenant House reception room at its temporary location on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Critics Join Together

All the while, a position paper opposing the 100-bed shelter in Hollywood for youth under 21 was being circulated by Dr. Richard MacKenzie, Childrens Hospital’s director of adolescent medicine, and Gary Yates, director of its High Risk Youth Program. The position paper had been developed in response to a request from the Coordinating Council for Homeless Youth Services--a network of Los Angeles agencies--to evaluate the Covenant House plans. It went out with the endorsements of 19 of the 23 member agencies; four did not sign because they supported Covenant House’s proposal.

The paper objected to the size and location of the shelter, saying that existing shelter beds and services in Hollywood were adequate and that such a large shelter did not allow for proper supervision and management; also, that it would adversely serve as a magnet for youth from other areas. It recommended smaller group homes located elsewhere, in areas of need such as South Central Los Angeles, Long Beach, Venice, Van Nuys.

Critics across the country and here question the effectiveness of Ritter’s methods, saying his large program and open intake model results in only a third of those served leaving the streets--Covenant House’s own figure--whereas smaller programs show a higher success rate--70% in Los Angeles’ smaller group homes, according to Yates, who has emerged as the voice of the opposition here.

That’s because such programs don’t take the really hard-core street kids, Ritter said. “That (percentage is) easy to achieve if you screen for success.”

In a cover letter to City Councilman Michael Woo, whose district includes Hollywood, Yates expressed concern about “the potentially negative impact of the Covenant House fund-raising and public relations machine on current service providers.”

Later in an interview, Yates, as have others, charged that for a year local agencies had cooperated in good faith, offering Covenant House the advice it solicited, only to later see it ignored. As for Covenant House drawing charity dollars away from other local services, Yates said in exasperation, “I personally have received six pieces of (fund-raising) mail from Father Ritter.”

Until mid-February, neither the Chancery Office of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, nor Archbishop Roger Mahony, commented on the Covenant House matter.

But after word filtered back to the Diocese that Ritter had said on occasion that the Archbishop was “actively opposing” him, and that Mahony had personally intervened with Mayor Tom Bradley to cancel a “welcome to L.A.” press conference, the Archbishop scheduled a meeting with Ritter. In anticipation, Mahony drafted a statement urging harmony and cooperation and, in that spirit, accepting Covenant House “into our midst.”

(A Franciscan priest with a national program, Ritter does not officially answer to the Diocese, but observers point out it is common church protocol that a program such as his operates at the invitation of the Archbishop.)

As for Ritter’s allegations, the Mayor’s office denies there ever was a press conference scheduled. And just prior to his meeting with Ritter, Mahony said in an interview, “I’ve had no contact (about Covenant House) with anybody yet in city or county government and I certainly have called nobody. That is not my style.”

He acknowledged that earlier he and Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco had written a letter urging Ritter to communicate with local youth service agencies on the West Coast. And several years ago, Mahony said, he had asked Ritter to hold off bringing Covenant House to Los Angeles until the Diocesan-run Angels’ Flight, a six-bed shelter for runaways, was off the ground.

He had, Mahony said, “the highest regard for Father Ritter and the things he has done.”

However, “I’m convinced smaller outreach facilities are more effective. We’re so spread out here,” he said. As for Ritter’s legendary fund-raising, Mahony said, “I have no problem with that. If Covenant House helps raise consciousness regarding the needs of young people, that’s all the better. Let’s do it together.”

At 62, Ritter is balding and pale, having recently gone through a year of chemotherapy and radiation to successfully battle Hodgkin’s disease, a treatment process that incapacitated and nearly killed him, he says. He is in and out of Los Angeles frequently now as the program has begun to take shape under the direction of Anne Donahue, a Georgetown law graduate who has worked with the program, first as a volunteer and then on staff, for the past seven years.

So far, they have hired some paid staff, and are working with homeless youth out of the temporary Hollywood office, even sleeping a few kids there in emergencies. The outreach van program is in full swing, and a 20-bed shelter is scheduled to be open within six months--but could be operational within weeks, Donahue says, depending on how soon a site is found. A soft-spoken man given to saying “God bless,” Ritter chuckles gently more than he laughs outright, jokes with kids and maintains an informal manner consistent with his preferred dress--jeans, running shoes, sweatshirt.

His substitute for sighing or complaining is to grin and utter one word plaintively: “Whimper.” He does it often. Word of upcoming social engagements, Roman collar appearances, “working the room” cocktail parties never fail to elicit that response.

Ritter is not completely laid back, however. He gathered with several community volunteers at Donahue’s rented house in Hollywood one Saturday night for Mass and supper before going out in the outreach vans. As he prepared to say Mass on a small table covered with a blue serape in Donahue’s living room, he rejected the various vessels offered to serve as a chalice and finally sent someone out to the Mayfair for a stemmed wine goblet.

The liturgy for the day included mention of the prophets, and in his homily Ritter sat back in an armchair and talked of prophets not as future-tellers but as those with spiritual and moral insight.

“Do we have prophets today? Maybe the kids are our prophets. The mere fact a bunch of kids do sleep under an overpass of the freeway--this is a judgment. Not a judgment on them, but perhaps a judgment on us who can choose not to see or to relegate their suffering as a mere social problem or prioritize them out of existence.”

Later, he went out with Donahue and the others in one of the two outreach vans, driving up and down Santa Monica Blvd. where teen-age males frequently work as prostitutes, stopping to talk with kids, while the crew dispensed hot chocolate and sandwiches. They convinced one scared-looking youth, just in from Maine that day, to go to the Volunteers of America shelter where Covenant House got him a room. “In the vernacular of the streets,” Ritter said, describing the youth’s vulnerability, “that is pure chicken.”

At an overpass of the Hollywood freeway, where as many as 16 teen-agers live, Ritter scrambled down the embankment to meet Hector from Guatemala who was reading a newspaper by candlelight. Now 17, Hector had been living there for two years, he told Ritter, having made a home out of carpet scraps, orange crates, and his own hand-painted murals in the place he calls “the hotel for people with no destiny.”

Of the street kids, Ritter said, “The realities they face are very simple. They don’t belong to anybody. They are genuinely very good and brave kids who want to make it back off the streets. What they need most is a place to finish growing up.”

He is a medieval theologian who is street-wise and the combination results in some startling observations: “The kids go straight to heaven like a rocket. My kids are not going to have any Purgatory. If I were God, I would not make these kids suffer a single instant in Purgatory. Can you imagine anything worse than selling your tail on Santa Monica Boulevard and then going to Purgatory for it? I mean, come on!”

The secret of Covenant House’s success, he said, is “we never close and a kid never gets turned away. It’s very simple.”

“Wonderful fund-raising rhetoric, lousy social work,” Gabe Kruks, director of youth services at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and a member of the opposition, remarked of open enrollment, saying it puts some kids at the mercy of violent or psychotic youths, drug dealers or pimps.

Beyond that, he called much of the Covenant House philosophy “enabling,” saying, “driving up to a kid, offering to take him to a shelter--you’re not empowering them to make choices.”

Covenant House rejects such criticism, saying that of course such dangerous types would be asked to leave, or “self-select out” as spokesman John Kells put it, and advised they would be welcome back when they decide they really want to make a change. The program is all about learning to make choices, Covenant House says.

That Ritter genuinely cares about young people is one thing even his most severe critics seem to give him, although they often say he has lost sight of it in the glitz and power of his empire.

“Ritter started this thing, I’m sure, for altruistic reasons,” Kruks said. “He was not a trained social worker. He probably made mistakes that most of us do, crossing boundaries. But you’ve got to learn from your mistakes. They refuse to look at their model. What I keep seeing is this incredible ego investment.”

Ritter’s unassuming manner, self-deprecating remarks and gentle, dimpled smile coexist with a watchful, often wary face and a swift, steely bite. He can give as good as he gets.

He said he was tremendously encouraged and pleased by the meeting with the Archbishop and his subsequent statement, and, indeed, the day after the meeting it was a very relaxed Ritter, Roman-collar loosened, who sat in the Sunset Blvd. offices and talked at length. He attributed much of the tension with the Archdiocese to missed communications and misunderstandings, and blamed some of that on his debilitated state from cancer therapy. Before their meeting, he had called objections, such as Mahony’s, to size and locale “specious.”

In general he said of the opposition he has met here, “It just bothers me--boy, does it bother me--that people are so afraid. Money and turf. It’s always money and turf. You’d think in a city like this people would say, ‘Yeah, we have a 20-bed shelter. Let Bruce try (his approach).’ Especially since it’s not costing anything.”

Of the criticism that he and his staff refuse to take advice, he shrugged, called it well-intentioned, but said, “Advice is advice.”

“It’s not that we solicited their advice and ignored it. We couldn’t take their advice. To say, ‘Welcome, but do it where and when and how we say and the size we say’--that is not networking.”

He can only speak about arrogance from his perspective, he said. “I am arrogant about one thing. I am very proud of it that when we have a program operational we never turn a kid away. The key to that is the size of the program and location. We are a big program, the biggest in the country. We’re almost alone in what we do. The open enrollment model threatens many here . . . I should have been more sensitive to the anxieties of other programs. When Covenant House was small, I remember how anxious I was. Maybe it’s easy for me to forget my own history. I tend to get carried away more directly towards achieving a goal.”

Both sides often quote the same scriptures to support vastly different interpretations of program philosophy, and both have a rebuttal for everything.

It is Ritter’s constant claim that there are no programs and no beds here for 18- to 21-year-olds, and that nothing is being done for them. Others, such as Gary Yates of Children’s Hospital, say there are such beds, and that 18- to 21-year-olds, legally adults in California, have access to various shelter programs for the homeless.

Ritter dismisses such beds as being simply a shelter for survival, not a program designed to help the older teen get off the streets.

By March, Ritter had met frequently with City Councilman Michael Woo and community leaders. Calling it a compromise of sorts, Covenant House agreed to form an advisory committee; to open a 20-bed shelter immediately; to not only hold off on a 100-bed facility but separate the 60-bed crisis shelter from the 40-bed Rights of Passage program, and to locate the latter outside of the Hollywood area; to open satellite programs in other parts of the county. In March, Woo’s office put out a press release announcing, “Woo Brings Covenant House to Hollywood . . . “

Yates and the Coordinating Council said they were outraged at Woo for not consulting them more substantially and called Covenant House’s supposed compromise none such.

It is not over.

“This is not a turf battle,” Yates said, pointing out that the Coordinating Council had recently accepted Covenant House into its AIDS prevention program. “We’d like to see them come around. If they would limit Covenant House to 20 beds in Hollywood and locate the others elsewhere, that would be a genuine compromise.”

“The thing that Covenant House has done well is build large facilities and raise money,” Ritter’s critic, Kruks, said, adding, “I do get the feeling Rights of Passage is a good program.”

Ironically, Ritter’s own sense of his mission comes close to that reading.

“I sort of hate to say this. A serious illness is supposed to make you more reflective. I’m sorry to say that didn’t really happen. I’m just as impatient. I’m not going to the desert to meditate and wait for death. I’d rather die with my boots on . . . I guess I’ve decided the thing I do best with the help of my staff is start new programs . . . In the final analysis it’s a simple conviction: Help as many kids as we can.”