Love in action.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman
• Position: Washington, D.C. antipoverty workers - Reflections - Column

Within the mile-and-a-half stretch between the White House and the U.S. Capitol--Caesar at one end, pharaohs at the other--is the Homeless Belt. Rachel's House, Sarah's House Mt. Carmel House, Zacchaeus community kitchen, the Community for Creative Non-violence, a pair of Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, and Luther Place women's shelter are among the scenes of mercy and rescue where thousands of the destitute and displaced receive care every day.

Both to get a reportorial fix on the American economy--a view from the bottom up, not the top down--and to be moochingly energized by contact with the shelter providers who open their hearts and doors to the poor, I've been a visitor to each of these places over the years. They are society's intensive-care units for the diseases of poverty.

The two that I've visited the most, taking large groups of my high-school and law-school students with me, are Luther Place and Llewellyn Scott Catholic Worker house. Since the 1970s, both have been run by people who practice a radical Christianity that sees welcoming the stranger as the central exercise of faith. Neighborhood gentrifiers have told both shelters to get lost, along with the lost souls in their care.

John Steinbruck is the pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church at 1226 Vermont Ave., NW, and Michael Kirwan heads Llewellyn Scott Catholic Worker at 1305 T Street, NW. There is a connection between their work and their faith. Without a belief in God and without a conviction that Christ is present in the homeless, neither Steinbruck nor Kirwan could have kept going all these years. The work is too emotionally draining, too politically dead-end, and often too physically wearying for the customary compensations--a paycheck, a 401(K) for retirement--to be pump-ups enabling them to face another day, week, or year of it. Government contracts and foundation grants are feeble enticements.

I'd argue that in any city in any part of the country, it's mostly, and perhaps only, people who are religiously motivated--and by a faith that emphasizes service and self-sacrifice and minimizes doctrines and pulpiteering--who are sharing their lives with the outcast poor. They do so not as dabblers who appear at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving and Christmas to elbow into the serving line for their annual moment of soup-ladling and then depart until next year's stint of feel-good charity. Instead, they engage in a lifetime commitment to what Dostoevsky, in his last and...