Bruce Ritter: A Puzzle for His Friends : Controversy: The priest’s associates are grasping at clues, trying to understand how he got into what Cardinal John O’Connor calls ‘this mess.’

Until December, the events of last year were part of a steadily swelling wave of adulation for Father Bruce Ritter.

The Franciscan priest who founded Covenant House in an East Village tenement in 1969 and turned it into the nation’s largest shelter program for street children was honored at the White House by President George Bush. Former President Ronald Reagan came by for lunch. Boys Town gave him its Father Flanagan Award for Service to Youth.

But the wave hit the rocks in December with the start of a lengthy stream of allegations and events that have severed Ritter’s relationship with the $87-million-a-year program and sent him into seclusion. Many of his friends and associates have gone into seclusion themselves. Those who will speak to the press seem haunted. Most describe a process of soul-seaching, looking for something to shed light on how Ritter could have come upon such days.

There is a lot for them to sort out: allegations of sexual misconduct with clients and cover-ups; a secret “Franciscan Charitable Trust Fund” known to only one Franciscan, Ritter; unorthodox loans to Covenant House board members and staff and Ritter’s sister; questionable living arrangements between some senior staff and clients. There have been investigations by the Manhattan district attorney’s office (dropped), the Franciscan order (completed) and the state attorney general (ongoing).

In early February, Ritter was ordered by the Franciscans to take a leave for rest and recuperation. By the end of that month, at their urging, he resigned as president of Covenant House.

In March, Cardinal John O’Connor, archbishop of New York, declared the situation “a mess,” and appointed two diocesan priests to temporarily take over administration of the non-sectarian organization. “It is no longer a question of guilt or innocence, but of public perception,” O’Connor said.

The allegations created an atmosphere so bizarre and scandalous that by late March it seemed sadly ironic but not shocking to see Ritter ridiculed in absentia on New York’s “sex channel” (Manhattan Cable).

During “Midnight Blue,” a show sponsored by Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein, Ritter--the crusader against pornography, the sex industry and all who prey upon the young--was “inducted” into a “Hall of Hypocrisy” amid much off-camera jeering.

“He’s gone from being Saint Bruce to Bad Bruce,” said Covenant House board member Ellen Levine, who is editor-in-chief of Woman’s Day magazine. “I think of him essentially as a very complicated person with what continues to look to me like pretty good intentions.”

Former board member Donna Santasiero, executive director of the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, described Ritter’s powerful effect on people during public appearances. In the next breath, she called the priest “standoffish,” adding, “I think he’s shy, for one thing.”

He hated formal occasions, Santasiero said, including fund-raising dinners for Covenant House.

“Such things are wearing for most of us. There’s a lot of show, you have to project. But for him a cocktail party was so remarkably painful. He’d see me and say, ‘Oh, Donna, I just can’t stand this,’ and he meant it. . . . I think he enjoyed more of a solitary life.”

Doug Lasdon, a former member of Covenant House’s legal department and a lawyer now working for a homeless advocacy program, continues to respect Ritter.

If there is truth to any of the allegations, Lasdon said, it stems from the rapid, unstructured growth of the program. “The program got so big that not changing his mom-and-pop, folksy way of doing work caught up with him.”

Marilyn Rocky, a former director of public affairs for Covenant House, said she feels betrayed by Ritter and the inner circle of highly paid staff who surrounded him. Nonetheless, she expressed some feelings similar to Lasdon’s.

“It is very clear Bruce was a reluctant hero,” Rocky said. “He was reticent, introspective at best. He started out quietly, slowly, at the grass-roots level. . . . I don’t think he evolved with the job.”

Ritter’s friends and associates are consistent in describing a man whose modus operandi derived more from Catholic tradition and culture--performing works of mercy--than the bureaucratic world of social work.

They all describe an independent man, who, despite a lifetime of commitment and connections to institutions, operated around them--ignoring or bending rules, sometimes with contempt, often articulating his conviction that he was doing the Lord’s work. In his case, the Lord’s work was for “my kids.”

He was born John Ritter in Trenton, N.J., on Feb. 25, 1927, taking the name of Bruce when he entered religious life.

Growing up in a poor family, he went to public schools, joined the Navy during the war and in 1947 entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventual.

With the Franciscans he prepared for a life of teaching medieval theology, a fact he has jokingly said left him ill-prepared for bureaucracy, politics or the street.

He was ordained in Rome in 1956. In biographical data supplied by Covenant House in recent years and publications such as “Who’s Who,” as well as in casual statements by Ritter, it has been said he was awarded his doctorate.

But he never received it.

“I was after him constantly to get it,” said Brother Luke Salm, a Christian Brother at Manhattan College in the Bronx, where Ritter taught from 1963 to 1968. Chairman of the theology department when Ritter taught there, Salm said he was an excellent teacher who had done all the work for his degree except the final requirement: publication.

Ritter held off, Salm said, wanting to perfect it.

“I’d say to him, ‘For God’s sake, nobody’s going to read the damn thing. Just get it,’ ” Salm said.

Ritter has often described his years at Manhattan College as happy and comfortable ones, and that is how others describe his years, too.

He lived in a cottage on campus, taught, worked in campus ministry and headed the Christian Life Council, a social action organization.

“In the mid ‘60s students were rebeling and it was pretty evident Bruce was riding with the students,” Salm said. “He was interested in them and their concerns. Some night he’d have three or four of them sleeping on the floor. Their parents had thrown them out because they had long hair or were missing Mass.”

Not all of the students who made their way to Ritter’s cottage were distressed. Hugh O’Neill, now with the Port Authority but then a student on the track team, called the place “an unofficial hangout for the track team.”

Joseph Fahey, now a professor in the religious studies department at Manhattan, was then a young instructor who regarded Ritter as a mentor.

“When I first started, I heard wonderful things from the kids. He was popular, dedicated, almost a mystic. You’d hear that a lot.”

Ritter was something of a hero, Fahey said. For example, the priest put his foot down on an ROTC custom, refusing to allow the reserve officers, during special Masses offered for them, to stand and raise fixed bayonets during the consecration.

In general, Salm said, “he had an independent streak in him. There’s no question it led to a lot of this difficulty.”

Ritter has always said that a public challenge from Hugh O’Neill during an on-campus Mass prompted him to leave academia. Ritter said he had taunted the students that in a short time they would “sell out,” giving up their youthful ideals for material success and the status quo.

Why don’t you practice what you preach? O’Neill is said to have asked him.

Although O’Neill remembers it less dramatically--a small Mass in a student lounge rather than a full congregation in church, a dialogue more than a declamation--O’Neill confirms the incident. He had no idea until years later that Ritter regarded it as seminal.

With the permission of his Franciscan superiors, Ritter left Manhattan College for the East Village in May, 1968, with no plans but a determination to make himself useful to the poor. By the following February, he has written, after six children asked him for shelter during a snow storm, Covenant House was born.

In the early days it was, in O’Neill’s words, an informal “crash pad for runaways.” O’Neill, and others from Manhattan and other Catholic colleges helped out, some moving in for a time, as O’Neill did in 1973. They got by on small donations, many of them obtained through Ritter’s guest preaching at various parishes on Sundays.

While it is true Ritter was burglarized by junkies repeatedly, he gave as good as he got, taking the law into his own hands. He hired neighborhood toughs to burglarize and trash the junkies’ pads, which he later took over.

“The Holy Spirit made me do it,” he has written, justifying it as “muscular Christianity.”

In those early informal years, confronted with increasing numbers of kids with nowhere to go, Ritter became committed to a policy of “open intake,” never turning a child away. As O’Neill recalled, it was a matter of finding room for one more--on a couch or the floor--in quarters where staff, volunteers and children were living together.

In 1972, When Ritter decided it was time to go legitimate, get licensed as a child-care agency and raise money, he was told by authorities that he “was guilty of harboring and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Ritter later described that as bureaucratic absurdity, but his casual “there’s always room for one more” approach contributed to his troubles of recent months.

At least two staff members recently resigned from the agency after it was learned they had Covenant House clients living with them, and Ritter himself admitted he stayed in a motel with a youth he was counseling. The youth alleged they had an on-going sexual relationship, which Ritter has steadily denied.

“The way Bruce Ritter explained Covenant House to me,” Ellen Levine said, “was that it has less to do with social work and more to do with social obligation. He said to me, ‘What kind of a society lets kids sleep in the street?’ ”

It was in the late 1970s that Covenant House took a major leap. Ritter’s work caught the attention of Robert Macauley, a prominent Catholic businessman, philanthropist and lifelong friend of President Bush. Macauley, who has refered to Ritter as his best friend, brought several other wealthy, conservative Catholics on the board, including industrialist J. Peter Grace and William Simon Jr., secretary of the treasury during the Reagan Administration.

To Donna Santasiero, these are the men “who made Bruce go big time.”

Macauley has agreed. It was he who persuaded a reluctant Ritter to raise money by writing monthly anecdotal letters about his “kids.” It was enormously effective. Direct mail contributions account for about 95% of the Covenant House budget.

The funds led to property acquisitions, expanded programs, international houses, and an operation that took on corporate trappings.

To some, Covenant House was growing too fast, and at the expense of good program. They describe an atmosphere of secrecy among an inner circle of senior staff while others were left in the dark and underpaid.

One former staff member, requesting anonymity, watched as Ritter, following an exhausting schedule of appointments, began sizing up potential meetings with people, rejecting some because their potential for contributions or contacts did not measure up.

These former associates do not accuse Ritter of self-enrichment; rather they call him a Spartan type who was not much for creature comforts. Ellen Levine remembers her frustration over Ritter’s refusal of a car and driver to bring him to a dinner party at her house in New Jersey several years ago. He was extremely weak from his bout with Hodgkin’s disease and chemotherapy, but even when she negotiated downwards to a taxi, she said he refused, calling it inappropriate.

As Joseph Fahey sees it, “He was in over his head.”

One steadfast critic of Ritter on program and policy is William Traenor at the American Youth Work Center, a youth advocacy agency, in Washington. Part of the problem that developed with Covenant House, Traenor believes, is that Ritter was perceived by the public as running a Catholic agency, while in reality it was a secular, nonprofit organization. The largely Catholic board deferred to the priest.

“For some purposes Covenant House could be seen as secular, at other times, Catholic,” Traenor said. “And in between, there sat Ritter, with the Church thinking the secular board was keeping an eye on him, (and vice versa.) He became totally unaccountable . . . and all that money did what all that money usually did. It was all loose change.”

Recently, Hugh O’Neill said, he has found himself looking back to those early days with Ritter “trying to put all that stuff going on now in some context.”

The allegations of sexual misconduct do not gibe with his image of Ritter, O’Neill said, and, as a friend he accepts his denial.

Inadvertent financial improprieties are easier for O’Neill to envision.

“Knowing Bruce, he would not have paid close attention to what you can and cannot do regarding the laws of IRS, of New York state. Beyond that, is it possible that at several key turns Bruce forgot the distinction between himself and the organization he created, when, as it got larger, there needed to be more of a distinction? Yeah.”

In February, Macauley, chairman of the board from 1977 until last fall, spoke of his fears for the future of the organization: “Father Bruce is Covenant House,” Macauley said. “Without him, Covenant House will fail--or be vastly reduced. No question about it.”

But the agency is battling that prediction and image. The directors have ordered a private, outside investigation of every allegation “no matter how wild,” and an independent program evaluation.

Operating under siege for months, Covenant House is sending out press releases about continued service and new board members, assuring reporters that donations are running ahead of projections.

Part of moving ahead is a determination to dissociate Covenant House from Bruce Ritter. As one Covenant House spokesman said, in response to a query, “Father Ritter is no longer associated with us.”