Scandal-Plagued Covenant House Gets Saved--by a Nun : Mission: Her warmth, charm and commitment helped the facility regain its credibility. In less than five years since the uproar, the New York agency has recovered about 80% of its losses.

These are some of the nightmares Sister Mary Rose McGeady lives with, not at night, but in the broad daylight of her life:

A 16-year-old Staten Island boy sleeps on the bare cement street after leaving his Dunkin’ Donuts job, where he used to shack up. He hasn’t seen or spoken to his mother in a year and his dad died of AIDS when he was only 12. With no brothers or sisters to turn to, he often contemplates suicide.

Seventeen-year-old Quiana returned to her Brooklyn home after a brief trip and found that her mother was evicted and admitted into a drug-rehabilitation center. Her 19-year-old brother is in jail for transporting drugs. She doesn’t want to sleep on the floor of her father’s girlfriend’s apartment. She’s afraid if she stays with any of her drug-user friends they’ll steal from her.

As president and chief executive officer of Covenant House International, the 67-year-old McGeady confronts a lot of real-life nightmares. So occasionally she feels entitled to a daydream.

“Wouldn’t it be neat to close this place down, to say, ‘We just don’t need it anymore?’ ” she said, gazing out a window of the agency’s crisis center on 41st Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan.

But on the same day that she would lead 2,100 youths at Times Square for the fourth annual nationwide candlelight vigil for homeless kids, she allowed little time for fantasy.

Last year, the New York-based Covenant House received 1.4 million phone calls on its emergency “nine line.” About 1,200 kids sought shelter in Covenant House every night of the year. The refuge provided 437,000 nights of shelter in all.

There are more than 1 million homeless and runaways under the age of 21 on the streets of the United States each year, according to the federal General Accounting Office. The National Network of Runaway and Youth Services estimates that on any given night more than 100,000 young people are alone on the streets.

No one understands these figures better than McGeady, the feisty Daughter of Charity and leader of the private, nonprofit agency for troubled youth. She reels off such startling statistics as compassionately as she would say the “Our Father.”

“In spite of how hard we are working, the numbers keep going up,” she said.

With the increasing numbers of street kids, her agency is expanding.

A Washington, D.C., chapter will join the roster of Covenant Houses in New York, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, California, New Jersey, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Canada. Plans to expand facilities in Atlantic City, N.J., and Hollywood are in progress.

For McGeady, more venues mean more parish speeches, donor receptions, fund-raisers, kids to care for and more prayers to be answered.

In September, 1990, McGeady replaced Covenant House founder the Rev. Bruce Ritter, after reports surfaced of his sexual impropriety with the charity’s male clients. Although he denied the allegations, a report commissioned by Covenant House later found five residents who claimed they had sex with Ritter and a sixth resident and four employees who said they rejected his sexual overtures.

“Time has changed things,” McGeady said optimistically, recalling her first couple of years on the job. When she took over, she faced a $13-million payment on one of the agency’s New York buildings. One-third of Covenant’s donors withdrew overnight. The budget went from $98 million in 1989 to $76 million in 1990.

“I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was 62,” she said. “But I made a covenant with the Lord. I said, ‘If you want this place to last, you’ll have to do it. I’ll give it my best.’

“We both kept our sides of the covenant. I never worked harder in my life.”

Times are better now.

McGeady said that shortly after the scandal, the situation was often the first topic mentioned in interviews and at donor receptions. Now, it ranks 15th or so, if at all.

“Sister is a symbol because she is a nun. But she is also a professional and very straightforward, like any corporate CEO,” said Bruce Henry, director of the New York chapter of Covenant House. “She also has an Irish warmth.”

That warmth, charm and commitment helped Covenant House regain its credibility. In less than five years since the scandal, the agency recovered about 80% of its losses. Each year, about $100,000 comes pouring in from thousands whom McGeady has written.

Besides raising money, McGeady concentrates on raising awareness, especially among legislators. She urges them to create a national youth policy that would provide job training and placement for youths and open up more day care centers for the children of teen-age mothers.

And she doesn’t think much of orphanages as a solution to the nation’s problem of homeless youths.

“If Newt Gingrich heard the sounds of kids crying themselves to sleep as they did at the orphanage I was assigned to, he would’ve never said what he did,” said McGeady, cringing at memories of her first assignment with the Daughters at the Home for Destitute Catholic Kids in Boston.

Gingrich (R-Ga.), the new Speaker of the House, recently suggested that the money being used to support unwed mothers is burdening the welfare system and that those funds should be used to build orphanages.

Most of the roughly 290,000 youths that have received care in Covenant House since it began in 1969 were running away from drugs, poverty, homelessness, sexual abuse and other problems, according to the agency’s reports.

Some of the kids who arrive on its doorsteps want a quick refuge from the streets--a place to hide from nagging pimps, abusive parents or gangs. Others want a warm meal and a place to rest at night away from their broken homes. Many come to escape the streets and learn a skill so that they can get a job.

“We want to make a dent and let them know they can improve,” McGeady said. “Once they get a job, make some money and believe they are good, they’re on easy street.”

Although she travels frequently, visiting the chapters and attending donor receptions, she reserves time to be with the youths.

“If you treat kids right, respect them, it’s a rare kid you can’t help,” she said. “They need someone to listen to them and give them positive reinforcement.”

“Most of what I know I learned from kids, not from my college textbooks,” said McGeady, who has a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Fordham University in New York and pursued doctoral studies there and at the University of Massachusetts.

She started her professional career working with homeless and disturbed children and their families in Boston at the Nazareth Child Care Center. Later she became executive director of the Astor Home and Clinic for Children in Rhinebeck, N.Y. In 1971 she started working at the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Brooklyn, where she later became associate executive director. She was also director of mental health services and regional director.

Because she lives in Brooklyn with other Daughters of Charity and spends most of her time at the New York office, it’s here where the kids really know her. They eat, play and live around her. At other locations, she has an “elevator” relationship with the kids.

“She’ll only have met you once and will always remember your name,” said Covenant House youth Christine Stewart, 18. “She’ll ask you how your day was and really want to know.”

“I believe very deeply in what I do,” McGeady said. “The only way I can fail is not to try.

“These kids are robbed of their childhood. At their age, all we thought about was whether we would go ice skating, see a movie or go to the school dance on a Friday night with our $1 allowance.”

When asked how she perceives her success as head of Covenant House, McGeady opted to answer by sharing one of her experiences.

She told of a crowded New York subway ride headed uptown. A young black man offered her his seat and stood near her. A few seconds later she felt a tap on the top of her head.

“Are you the Covenant House nun?” he asked her. A sudden hush fell over the subway car. When she nodded, his face lit up. He proudly identified himself as “a Covenant House kid” and recounted how the organization had saved him from death in Times Square.

During his 1 1/2 years at Covenant House, he learned how to cope with a computer and finished high school. Later he completed college and got a job on Wall Street. He said he wanted to go back and thank the people at Covenant House, but never got around to it.

He looked earnestly at her and asked, “Will you say thanks to everyone for me?”