As reported in yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Churches won’t try to run shelter without PADS in partnership,” Nov. 6), the Park Ridge Ministerial Association (“PRMA”) has abandoned its efforts to open a homeless shelter in Park Ridge because its homeless shelter franchise of choice, PADS to Hope, Inc. (“PADS Inc.”), decided it can’t be bothered with complying with our zoning laws.

Apparently PADS Inc. was insulted that our Planning & Zoning Commission and our City Council had the audacity to expect compliance with our zoning laws.  PADS Inc.’s high dudgeon stems from its claim that none of the other communities on its traveling road show circuit required such compliance – further evidence that (as H.L. Mencken might have said), you won’t go broke underestimating the intelligence of most public officials.

That a carpetbagger organization like PADS Inc. would take its ball and go pouting back home to Palatine doesn’t surprise us.  The numerous legitimate questions about PADS Inc.’s operations and effectiveness in combating homelessness raised by so many of our residents and other interested parties (e.g., St. Paul of the Cross Concerned Parents) over the past nine months since the PRMA first announced that a PADS shelter was moving into St. Mary’s Episcopal clearly had an “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect on an organization that seems to have escaped serious scrutiny for quite awhile. 

But what about our local clergy who run the PRMA?  What about their “ministry” that demanded the establishment of a homeless shelter for all those Park Ridge homeless?

Well, according to PRMA spokesman Rev. Stephen Larson of St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, the PRMA can’t open a shelter without PADS Inc. because that organization provides “background checks, identification cards, psychological and medical counseling, employment referrals, linkage agreements with police departments and other social services.” 

C’mon, Rev. Larson…do you really think Jesus would let those things get in His way if He really believed a one-night-a-week, six-month-a-year shelter was such an important “ministry”? 

First of all, the “psychological and medical counseling” issue is a complete red herring, because PADS Inc. did little more than a once-a-year check up for its traveling road show “clients.”  If the PRMA really cared about these health issues, however, we have to believe it could work out an arrangement with Lutheran General for health services every bit as good as, or even better than, what PADS Inc. provides. 

As for “background checks [and] identification cards,” that looks like another red herring, because we’re pretty sure PADS Inc. fans like Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and Chief of Police Tom Swoboda could arrange for the Park Ridge Police Dept. to handle the background checks and any of the other public safety services which PADS Inc. expected to secure through a “linkage agreement” with the City; and PADS Inc. fan and Park Ridge Park District President Dick Barton could arrange for the Park District to provide the picture I.D.s. 

That leaves only “employment referrals” and “other social services” as missing pieces that PADS Inc. allegedly would have provided.  Might we suggest that, if those services can’t be provided by one or more of our local social service organizations like the Center of Concern, maybe Mayor Frimark could negotiate a contract for them with PADS Inc. in much the same way as he wanted to negotiate a contract with PADS Inc. to put one of its franchises in the Public Works Service Center?

We can’t guarantee that all of this would work out the way we have suggested.  But the fact that the PRMA is so willing to walk away from what it was calling, just weeks ago, an essential “ministry” indicates that this was never really about helping the homeless but, instead, was about helping PADS Inc. to expand its franchise so that it could get more government and private funding.  And it also suggests that the PRMA was not exactly telling the people of this community the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about its support for a PADS Inc. franchise in Park Ridge.

Finally, we need to recognize one Robert O’Neill of Park Ridge, who – in an “Open Letter of Contempt” published in yesterday’s Herald-Advocate – called the people who “created enough noise to keep a homeless shelter out of Park Ridge…narrow minded jackals” and venomous “snakes,” in part, it seems, because they were also critical of his pastor, St. Paul of the Cross’s Fr. Carl Morello.

For ratcheting up the nasty rhetoric well beyond that of Fr. Morello, who merely branded those same people as practitioners of “thinly veiled racial and economic bigotry,” we bestow on O’Neill the inaugural “Pseudo-Christian of the Week” Award.  We also look forward to his next letter to the Herald-Advocate announcing that he has begun taking one homeless person into his own home one night per week between now and April.1 as his own personal effort to remedy homelessness.

Now, when can we expect to hear that same announcement from all you PRMA clergy and your White Shirted supporters?