The Patrician Movement
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Msgr. Dermot N. Brosnan is founder of the unique concept of substance abuse treatment provided by the Patrician Movement in San Antonio, Texas. He has more than 35 years experience in working with Hispanic persons in the areas of substance abuse prevention and treatment.
I’m very happy to be with you this morning and to have the privilege of sharing with you some of the things that many drug abusers shared with me. I’m also happy to tell you that everything I know and that I have accomplished, besides the priests of God and staff, I have learned from the drug abusers. And so my presentation will be as if you came for treatment and I will tell you how I got involved. As you can see, I’m just 5’6” and I have not added one inch to my stature, nor to my work with substance abuse; but I can tell you that my height has been an asset. It has been an asset because it was non-threatening to gangs. You never think of these things, but sometimes we don’t look at the blessings we have and count them and thank God for what we have. And so this morning I will try to share with you how I got involved in substance abuse and how the Patrician Movement evolved. I came to the United States in September of 1957 and I was assigned to St. Patrick’s Parish on the East Side (of San Antonio), which was an old Irish parish but had long ceased to be that except in name. When I arrived there it was probably around 65% to 70% Hispanic. It was completely run down. If there were 600 people going to church between men, women, and children, that was the maximum, because World War II had developed Fort Sam Houston into such a huge base that they cut St. Peter out of St. Patrick and that was the end of St. Patrick’s Parish. St. Patrick’s then continued going down. Big homes, the old style home, were cut up into apartments to provide for troops and their families and their children in WWII. I was young, just newly ordained. Being young, I was put in charge of the youth. I hadn’t any qualifications. I hadn’t even baptized a child. In fact, the first child that I did baptize, there were seven of them that Sunday which I will never forget, and they all had Spanish accents and I had an Irish accent. The first one said to me, “Jesus Rodriguez,” and I couldn’t spell it. When I asked the father to spell it, and he said “J-E-S-U-S.” I almost passed out because that’s my boss and I couldn’t spell His name. Later on I spoke in Gaelic and none of them knew anything about what I said and I felt pretty good.
A few months later I started to get involved with the youth and really was
committed. I really loved the youth especially in our school – St. Patrick
School – and in the public schools we had about 700 or 800 children going to
public schools.
So I concentrated on that and it didn’t take long to find out that we had two major gangs in the parish – the Loma and the Austin street gangs. Both were in St. Patrick’s Parish. There was a tremendous gang problem in San Antonio at that time, as there is still today. By November of 1959, it must have been approximately two years, and a Mr. Doolittle from Emerson Junior High School called me. He was a Methodist minister, but a very fine principal – way ahead of his time. He said, “Father, you know we have both gangs here at Emerson – the Loma and the Austin gangs – and there is supposed to be a very bad gang fight this afternoon, a Friday afternoon. Would you mind coming? I know they respect a priest and I know you work with them. How about coming? Maybe your presence might help.” I was late getting over there, and on my way in my ’53 Chevrolet I saw two of the Loma gang coming, one of them severely lashed, cut, bleeding. I stopped my car, got out, and patriotically, civically, ethnically, religiously I threw the book at the two kids. When I was finished and took a breath, the kid that was cut said, “Father, what did you ever do for us?” Before I could answer that he said, “Listen, any time we went up to the rectory and asked for the baseball bats and whatnot, or asked for the basketball, we were run out. The other kids would come and you and the other priests might go out and play with them from time to time. What’s the difference?” Suddenly I realized, here this child was bleeding profusely. There was a difference: He was known as a pachuco (Spanish slang for “bad guy”) from the Loma gang by Church and state, by the citizenry, branded by you and me and people like us. I apologized and took him down to Santa Rosa Medical Center, got him taken care of and on the way back we talked. I said, “If you’d like to come on Thursdays we have our youth club. If you want to pick a night of your own, that’s yours.” I was praying they’d pick a night of their own because I knew if they didn’t – if they came to the youth club – our very fine Catholics would take their children out because the gangs were coming now. Thank God the Holy Spirit saw that they did pick a night of their own, and that really was the beginning of the Patrician Movement. I had no vision of what was taking place, no intent or anything like that. The reality was that they were all children of God, made in the image and likeness of God and that the salvific will of God excludes nobody and brands nobody. It wasn’t very long into 1960 when one evening, with the help of four of the men’s club, we had about 35 Loma boys that were coming regularly. One night they said, “why not name the outfit.” I never thought of it. The four men that were down at the back of the classroom, and the names were identifiable with the Loma gang. So I said “no, no, no.” I knew there’d be possible gang fights with turbulence if the names were not acceptable. Finally they said, “What do you suggest?” and I said, “Why not call it Patricians? This is St. Patrick’s Parish, and if it ever came to be anything it would be nice to identify it with the East Side where it began.” It was okay. In 1964 when we incorporated, we put movement after it. It has nothing to do with being Irish – pure accident, and there it is. We challenged the Loma boys to bring the Austin boys and to come together. On the night that we appointed, 35 Loma boys turned up but nobody from the Austin gang. I went to my ’53 Chevy and I knew where the Austin gang was, and I brought six of them with me. I didn’t lie, I just didn’t tell them that there were 37 Loma boys. When they came in and saw the 35 Loma boys they almost passed out, but I guaranteed that they would come back safe. The next time we met there were 35 Loma, 45 Austin and the two gangs were together for the first time.
We worked with them, challenged them, we did everything we could to keep them
interested. One night, without my knowledge, the two gangs on a Saturday night
decided to meet to formally make a peace pact near Rattlesnake Hill. When they
did, a carload of guys from the West Side came to try and stop the peace pact.
One was shot through the stomach on the way back after the peace pact meeting
had taken place.
They came to the rectory and told me what had happened, that they had wanted
to surprise me at the 9 o’clock Mass on Sunday by coming together with the two
gangs; but this had intervened. They helped apprehend those that were
responsible for the shooting. Later on that young man in the Loma gang who was
shot, Robert, served his country in Vietnam, was highly decorated, wounded 11
times, and is still alive today and one of the outstanding stone masons in the
country.
We met regularly at St. Patrick’s and with that came my sensitivity to them.
Sometimes they were giddy, sometimes they were wild, sometimes they were
quiet, sometimes they were sleeping, nodding off. I just asked questions,
“Why?” They would simply say, “You don’t know why?” and the answer was “No.”
Of course it was because they were high on pills, red birds, yellow jackets,
you name it, or they had Mad Dog. You want to know what Mad Dog is? It’s the
cheapest wine you can get. MD 20/20. You just do that to the glass and it’s so
cheap it rings, not because it’s cut glass, but because it’s poor glass. And
many of them would drink that MD 20/20 and just get crazy from the stuff and
mix it will pills and weed and so on.
Then I started to try and get them back into school, because they were being kicked out of school. I started to find out there are different standards of education. In the North Side of San Antonio all the kids were being prepared by good curriculum for college, whereas on the West Side, South Side of San Antonio, and the East Side the standards of public schools were atrocious. They couldn’t care less whether the kids came to school or not. I got involved with the San Antonio police, the juvenile department. There was a big captain there. He was 6’5”. He was an extraordinary police officer, one of the greatest Catholic men that I have known. He went all over the city talking, trying to encourage kids out of gangs and problems with drugs. We got very close. I saw how he worked and then we worked together. Then I found out about juvenile court and I got in with the judge. Then we started to go the schools and raise Cain about kicking kids out and suspending kids and all this kind of thing. To find out, again, there was no solution. I found out that many of these kids were poor and hungry and didn’t have sufficient clothing, that their parents, their father, was making 50 or 75 cents an hour, and they didn’t have enough to eat. They were illiterate, all kinds of problems, because they were being maintained, period. I began to see opportunities to change leaders of gangs from one school to another school, but I was told that was impossible. You know why it was impossible? Because if they allowed a few kids to change schools, then the blacks and the Hispanics would want to move into the good school districts. That was called education! That was called justice! That’s who the children’s minds were entrusted to: public schools that were steeped in discrimination and racial hatred. We began to confront that. Keep them, don’t let them move. They were encroaching into the white folks area.
By 1964, Archbishop (Robert E. ) Lucey, who was a great champion of social
justice, the migrant worker, minimum wage and all that, gave permission to
incorporate and said, “Get your own people. You know who you need. Get them
and go with it. When I get back from the Vatican Council I will release you
full time.” Eventually he did.
In 1965 we applied for a grant under the War on Poverty. The white folks said, “Look at it again, these social, wasteful programs.” Yet, that’s one of the children of the War on Poverty: the Patrician Movement, one of the first drug programs in the world, in the United States, that treated alcohol and drug abuse. You must remember, Alcoholics Anonymous wouldn’t touch a drug abuser. Wouldn’t touch them! They were persona non grata! Whether it was alcohol or drug abuse, they wouldn’t be touched! We tried many times. From 1934 up to that time, Alcoholics Anonymous was for the white folk, and basically for middle upper America. You may not appreciate that, but these are realities. In 1966 we were awarded $375,000 for one year. All we did was try to staff and train them. Up to that time we detoxed people cold turkey at home. Locked the door, got the husband and wife to help if it was a son or a daughter or if it was the husband we’d lock him into a room in the house and let him kick cold turkey. Or we’d get a friend in the police department to pick him up for vagrancy because he didn’t have a dollar in his pocket, and hold him for four or five days so that he could kick the habit. We had a vagrancy law at that time that if you didn’t have a dollar in your pocket you could be picked up. Can you imagine? That was for the Blacks and the Hispanics. We made the best out of it. We used it to help people. With that War on Poverty grant we were able to get a staff and train them. Some had a masters in social work, some were recovered drug abusers. We were able to contract with Santa Rosa Medical Center to do detox and to get us a special price. We got a doctor who barely took a few dollars and did detox there. Then we got help and started a little woodwork shop and were able to pay minimum wage and began to develop our own concept. The addicts used to tell me, “Father, you have to understand that as drug abusers, when we are under the influence, we’re like animals.” I didn’t understand what he was saying. The truth of the matter was, and this I want to share with you, that’s true. When you’re under the influence of morphine, you can be in surgery. And you come in to the recovery, not to recover from the surgery, but recover from the morphine. I began to understand that the difference is that these are not anesthesiologists, but that’s what they’re doing with alcohol or drugs. They’re anesthetizing themselves. If that’s the case, how can you talk to them when the two things that differentiate us from the brute animal and the plant – the mind and the soul – are desensitized, they’re narcotized. That’s why programs are a failure. With those grants that we got for four years from the War on Poverty, we then tried to get a center, buy seven and a half acres of land in Hamilton, Texas, to set up the whole center with one area for adults and the other area for children so that we could use the central facilities between both.
It was obvious that this was a problem of men, women, and children. It’s a
family problem. It’s a community problem. It’s a national problem. It’s a
worldwide problem. When we started out it was said there were 375 heroine
addicts in San Antonio by the FBI. The San Antonio Police Department said
there were 575. That’s what they said. There was no heroin in the north,
northwest side, northeast side. Today I estimate there are, between drug
abusers and alcohol, anywhere up to 75,000 in need of absolute, real heavy
treatment at this very time, this very day.
And we have less treatment today than we had 25 years ago, thanks to our Democratic and Republican parties, who cut and cut and cut for the least political power. You must try to realize that there is very little power for those who are afflicted with the problem of alcohol or drug abuse because there is no constituency. The Patrician Movement never developed a constituency because we respect all those who come to us for treatment. They’re not addicts and they’re not alcoholics, they’re United States citizens that for whatever reasons – and their reasons are many and variable – have been afflicted with problems. They’re not recovering alcoholics and they’re not recovering drug abusers, they’re United States citizens made in the image and likeness of God. The faster and sooner we stop branding people, the better we’ll be off, because it’s important for us to realize that God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save the human race, not to stigmatize or label anybody. It’s we, the human race, that have labeled each other to our own liking, to discriminate. Sad, but true. As our grant ran out, we got a grant from the Texas criminal justice in the amount of $1 million. At the same time, our efforts to get the ranch failed. But it was a blessing because in 1970 St. John’s major/minor seminary closed and the then-archbishop of San Antonio, Archbishop Francis Furey, gave the whole campus 15 acres and 90,000 square feet of facilities to the Patrician Movement, free. Our great citizenry, especially one individual, saw an opportunity of taking issue with converting that seminary into a center of human growth and development for people with a problem with alcohol and drug abuse, for getting elected onto the city council. She made it her campaign. She got a group of Anglos, a few rednecks around her, and then got a few Mexicans to add a little color, who really didn’t understand what was going on, and filed a suit on us. At the same time, pressure was put on the city to deny us a certificate of occupancy because we were starting a drug program where this beautiful campus was a seminary for men aspiring for the priesthood — as if they cared. So we lost $1.2 million. Plus, hundreds were denied the opportunity of treatment. There was one year of horrible exposure and horrible back and forth, all kinds of protests, campaigns, and pickets and everything. Finally, the city council heard it, and there was five and a half hour meeting at city hall and we lost. Six voted against us and three voted for us. Finally, in July of 1971, our board of directors filed a suit and went to trial against the city and we won before a judge. The judge ordered the City of San Antonio to issue our certificate of occupancy. As we left the court, that lady who later became a councilwoman and her so-called supporters physically spat on us as we left the court, physically spat on us. That’s the caliber. The attorney said to me, “How can you accept that?” I said, “It’s simple. They need more help than any alcohol or drug abuser will ever need, and they’ll never get it. They don’t know they need help. But Christ was crucified, we were just there. She and her group went down and later we had a trial before a jury, a four and a half day trial. Again we won before the jury. That was the first time in the history of the United States that any drug program or alcohol program sued a city hall and won. It set a precedent. That’s important to understand because as United States citizens and Christians and Catholics we have to stand by Christ, not just glorified but crucified. He said, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavily burdened and I will refresh you. And when two or three of you gather in My name, I am right there.” Do you believe Him? I do. The Patrician Movement does and it has gone on to glorious work.
The movement got involved in the legislative process in 1964 with the Texas
Legislature and the board departments and parole, with the courts of justice.
It was responsible for the first person getting probation from Judge Archie
Brown, with six children. At that time we thought getting probation with the
condition of treatment was something fantastic. The treatment we had to offer
was six weeks, God bless us. It was nothing, but it was marvelous in those
days to have six weeks. We had nothing, but we also had great men and women,
recovered and professional, that worked the system.
We took that seminary and converted it into a center of human growth and development and it became a little village named “La Villita de San Patricio.” There we demonstrated that it was the totality of living, that it was a school in the realest sense: body, soul, and mind. We had counselors, we had teachers, we had a nurse, we had a doctor, and the whole process of a little village concept where the families were involved, where people were able to come into residential, detox residential. Today, that center, under the Patrician Movement, board of directors headed up by Dr. Patrick Clancey as the executive director, is known all over the nation. Never once has it advertised, because the greatest advertisements are the ambassadors of good will: those great people who are the recipients of the treatment and who have responded. Yes, the courts of justice started referring. The federal and state courts, the local courts, county courts, municipal. All of that has happened because of those kids called pachucos. Think about it. They influenced universities and medical schools, because of raising the issues of discrimination, not even teaching one course in medical school until well into the late eighties. In 1985, the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse was finally formed, and I can tell you, legislatively, the greatest opposition we had was from Alcoholics Anonymous and trying to get those two together under one commission. Were it not for our governor, Gov. Ann Richards, and our lieutenant governor, Mr. Bob Bullock, it wouldn’t have happened. When we were trying to get insurance to cover alcohol and drug abuse, we had to compromise and keep drug abuse out so that we could pacify and get the bill passed in the Legislature just for alcohol and wait for two years later to get drug abuse included. When you stop and think of what we have done to people … I don’t know any alcoholics. I don’t know any drug abuser. I know people made in the image and likeness of God, and I know Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for every one of them. That’s where the power is. All we have to do is cooperate with that, give our best whatever specialties we have, and stop ourselves discriminating.
I do not believe that it is a sickness, that it is an illness, that it is a
disease. What I do believe is that it is a consequence of the human race
turning away from God and trying to go independently. That’s where the Church
must come out and say, “Listen, we all suffer from the defects of the fall of
the human race one way or another. And Jesus Christ is not responsible for
some being more lost than others.” I refuse to accept that. Because we’ve all
been redeemed we just need to realize the importance of our cooperation.
Because of our weaknesses, many times we need the cooperation of other people.
Some are recovered from alcohol, some are recovered from robbery, some have
recovered murder, some have recovered from corporate crime, some have
recovered from domestic abuse, some have recovered from child abuse, all kinds
of recovery. Let’s work together, and let’s build up a constituency where we
confront our national, state, and local governments who take advantage of
those who do not vote because of their illness, who take advantage of those
who are not educated, who take advantage of those who cannot help themselves
at this particular time: minorities.
Look at education. Look at it! It’s an atrocity! 90 million people marginally or functionally illiterate in the greatest country in the world. Three quarters of this city, a city of 1.3 million, three quarters of the city is in poverty. Three quarters of this city are marginally or functionally illiterate. We’re still fighting to try and get a living wage. We still have school districts in this city whose standards are despicable. We still have school districts who give contracts to the highest bidder, not to the best bidder. Our school districts are elected by 7%, which means 93% of the people of this city ignore school board elections, ignore civic responsibilities. The family and education are the essence and the Church must come forward for all citizenry, all of the denominations, not just for some. The Patrician Movement, as it is, is one of the few remaining residential programs in this state. The government has successfully wiped them out. Successfully! I mean successfully! We have money for everything except our own citizens. We talk about terrorism, but the terrorists have been going on for 50 or 60 years. Drunken driving: over 20,000 murdered every year. Why isn’t it called murder? People are knowingly and willfully taking alcohol to excess and getting into an automobile, murdering 20,000 a year. 125,000 killed or seriously injured every year. Look at what’s going on with heroine, ecstasy, LSD, all of the drugs. In fact, in Texas we have 147,000 people in prison, over 350,000 on state probation, over 150,000 on state parole, over 1 million on the front end of criminal justice system. My God, we’re one of the greatest nations for making people criminal. I’m not for legalizing drugs, but I’m not for legalizing murder by alcohol and drug abuse. I’m just as interested in putting Enron into prison for life as I am about a drunken driver or somebody that fell asleep because they were under the influence of heroine. I want the people with substance abuse problems to get as good a break as Merrill-Lynch got a week or two ago by a slap in the wrist for $100 million because they negotiated without any trial. Isn’t that nice? $100 million, isn’t it nice? Or for that great national, international, professional drug treatment program in Dallas a few years ago. But because of all criminality it was involved in, agreed to pay $125 million back. Isn’t that nice? But when our Democrats and our Republicans decide how to build a new industry, to gain more votes, they decided how to build a criminal justice prison system here in Texas. The rural of Texas has gotten a bonanza at a few places… 1,000 prisoners, 800 workers, $35,000 a year plus for 800 workers in a community that had only three or four or five hundred people working. It’s fantastic. It really is. It really is. Aren’t you proud of it? We as the capital of Texas, we execute the mentally retarded. We’re very proud of that. We talk about what goes on in Afghanistan and all these places, and I agree we need to stop terrorism, but how about the terrorist things that are going on in our own nation? I don’t see the Democrats and Republicans showing any real interest in stopping the alcohol abuse, drug abuse, corporate crime abuse, business abuse. I don’t see that. That’s terrorism. You see, my good people, we have to stop and think that when we are looking at treatment we have to understand what it is we’re treating. The drug abusers have taught me to bring it down and get away from all of the snobbery and highfalutin stuff. Do you know that all of the psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, clergy, teachers, you know that we all have the same common problem? Not one of us can read one part of another human being. Do you realize that? Not one of us, for sure, can read the thoughts of another human being! But, good God, don’t we act like it?
First of all, define what a human being is. It might seem simplistic but it
really isn’t. A human being is made up of four elements, loosely speaking:
plant life, animal life, rational life, spiritual life. All four must be
present to have a human being and all are the creative work of God, but we’re
so intelligent that we forget that it fell, that human beings fell. And with
that fall came all of the defects of the human race until the end of time. We
enhance those defects when we ingest alcohol, drugs, lies, manipulation,
violence, all these other things. We lose the control, or diminish the control
that the mind and that the soul has.
The family is the very essence of our society. In our Judeo-Christian Western civilization, the child enters and becomes a member of civil society, not by himself or herself, but through the family into which he or she was born. With the manipulation of today’s society, we have bisected the family! We have done violence to the offspring of that family with no accountability on our part. We have done violence! We have stripped the children of what has been contracted with God! It doesn’t enter into the criminal justice system. It doesn’t enter in the judicial process. It doesn’t enter into disposition of why the child is a delinquent, why we have pedophilia, why the clergy are making mistakes, why parents are making mistakes. 24 million children this very minute in the United States don’t have a father present. 24 million children do not have a father present. That’s okay, though, isn’t it? Huh? Isn’t that all right? We can label and we don’t have to look at reality. Let’s stop and think of those four elements: plant, animal, rational, spiritual, coming from the family. Two of them are external, they can be seen: the plant and the animal. Two of them cannot be seen: the rational and the spiritual. Two are external, two are internal. At the Patrician Movement, we try to teach those things through the counselors, through the teachers, through groups, through church, through the whole lot. You can go down there and see trees. You can see plants. You can see trees that were designed. You can see lawns. You can see flowers. All to enhance the meaning of plant life, the beauty of plant life. All trying to inspire and uplift the magnificence of those who for whatever reason have been downtrodden: the alcoholic, the addict, the prostitute, the drug dealer, the criminal, the Mexican, the black, yeah, that’s right. And the animal. Stop and think about it. We all as babies had to be potty-trained. I hope all of you have. I know I have. We all had to be taught how to move, to turn, to kick, to crawl, to stand, to talk. We don’t remember most of it, but look at how essential it was. Look at how essential the medical aspect of the externals are: nutrition, food, medical, good nutritional habits, eating habits, good lifestyle, all part and parcel, prenatal care. Look at the advances of medicine. Has everybody access to those? Think about it! What about the intellectual and spiritual. How come we have 90 million, in the greatest nation of the world, marginally or functionally illiterate? That has no effect on the rest of us, even from a selfish point of view? This archdiocese did a study last year – they never published it – about the attendance at Mass. They were so shocked: 35%. 35%. Think about it. When you stop and realize that the method of abuse, that the alcohol, the heroine, the cocaine, the angel dust, just goes through the external – the plant and the animal. That’s just the mode in which it goes through those two to get to these two – rational and spiritual. Once they’ve entered these two, now we are performing at our highest level as an animal and as a plant. We’ve been desensitized, millions of people through alcohol and substance abuse. But we expect them to perform as morally upright people! We expect them to be responsible. 80% of our women that come through the Patrician Movement have been sexually abused, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years of age. Do you know any judge in this country or in the world that will entertain the fact that this child was sexually abused by an adult as a mitigating circumstance in understanding why this person has been involved in a vehicle of escape: alcohol or drug abuse? No! I tried! I tried and tried!
Enron, they’re finding justifiable explanations and excuses, aren’t they? Sure
they are. Stop and think for a minute. How can you expect and anybody that’s a
real alcoholic and a real drug abuser to be morally and intellectually
responsible for the free will? It’s not there. I had 16 inches of my large
colon taken out eleven years ago. I don’t remember it, because the most
important man on that surgical team – the anesthesiologist – took away my
intellectual ability and my conscience by an anesthetic and kept it so, and
monitored it, until the surgery was completed, and then brought me back.
It must be promoted by you and I and by those who understand that there is nothing greater on the face of the earth than a human being made to the image and likeness of God, and the alcohol and the drugs have not in any way diminished that person. We have to turn to programs like the Patrician Movement, like Alcoholics Anonymous, like Narcotics Anonymous. All of these are doing their part one way or another. We’re not in competition. The only competition that we’re in is to fulfill the will of our heavenly Father who mandated us to go to teach, to preach, to rule, and to sanctify, and to understand that wherever two or three of us are gathered together, “I’m right there.” When those young kids confronted me, that was the mission they had. They didn’t know it and I didn’t know it. We didn’t know it. No more than the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous knew it. No more than the founders of Narcotics Anonymous knew. What we have to do is understand the meaning of life as given to us by God in His creative power. Nothing is impossible. Thank God we have witnessed miracles day after day at the Patrician Movement, through various other types of programs, whatever it might be, Alcoholics Anonymous. We have to speak positively, dynamically, and challengingly and we must concentrate on the magnificence of the human person. It’s the greatest thing on the face of the earth. There’s nothing greater.
They’re out there right now in outer space 22 or 23 miles up, waiting for
clearance to come in, all because of human beings. And you say that we can’t
get a better handle on alcohol and drug abuse? I don’t believe that. I don’t
believe that!
When you go to the Patrician Movement, you recognize what it is that we must do. We have to recover the person from alcohol or drugs in his or her totality, looking at the faults and weaknesses, looking at what as taken place, looking at the deprivation that has been imposed, not many times voluntarily. Would I be the same if I didn’t have a father? Would I be the same if I had been socially deprived? Could I be the same if I didn’t have the same educational background I had from my mom and dad? Could I be the same if I was illiterate? Could I be the same without the sacraments and without the grace of Mass? Could I be the same without prayer? No. No way. You can go to the Patrician Movement and you can see these so-called addicts and alcoholics dropping in and out of church. There’s not pressure. We have all denominations there. I have seen people of Jewish faith reading the New Testament in Mass, if that’s what they wanted. I’ve seen families coming back to God. I’ve seen people making full recovery. The thing that we have to understand is to do the best we can. The motto of the Patrician Movement: the seal is the three crosses. It represents the human race as Christ willed it to be. We all have to decide which cross we’re on because on the bottom of the seal is our motto: The Lord is our hope. What is your hope? You are the hope and you are the light and you have a mission. That mission has to include the legislature, voting, education. Hopefully, the Supreme Court, with the help of your prayers will rule in favor of parental choice in education: the voucher. Oh yes, there’s a lot against it: damaging public schools that can’t be damaged any more than they are. Billions of dollars, I mean billions, pouring in money, pouring in money, not that they get any results. I’m going to tell you straight, I don’t know of any greater divine responsibility than the divine responsibility that God placed on mom and dad for the education, as the primary teachers of their children. Until this nation sees fit to respect that God-given right, we’ll never wipe out illiteracy in this country. Hopefully, if the Supreme Court rules in its favor then people like you will encourage private schools, parochial schools, schools for profit. The more schools and the more types we have, the greater opportunity there is. Nobody’s trying to wipe out the public school system. Are the vouchers legal? Yes, they are. The greatest voucher system is the G.I. Bill of Rights. Many priests and ministers of this country have entered the religious life through the use of the G.I. Bill for the sole purpose of promoting religion. Surely to God, if you can do that, an innocent child should be eligible. All I’m asking you to do is to pray that you will, in your respective roles of life, do as those pachucos did. They are responsible for one of the oldest drug programs in country – the Patrician Movement – starting. I acknowledge them and I will tell you, in conclusion, the car I have, the automobile I have, wouldn’t fit into my garage. It was a double garage. I didn’t realize it when I got the car. So there I was with a double garage I couldn’t use. Stupid of me, eh? We discover so many things after the fact. For a while I was thinking, “What could I do,” and then it dawned on me with the help of a few friends to close it in and make a master bedroom out of it. But it is a stone house. Then I remembered my stone mason, Robert, who was shot the night of the peace pact meeting. I realized his father, now long deceased, was a master stone carver. So I set out to try and locate them, and I found that they were now in Austin building big huge half million dollar stone homes for a big corporation. I got in touch with him, Robert and his brother. His brother was one of the key members of the gang – Carlos. They came by to see me and I said, “You know what? I’m thinking of closing this in.” They said, “Fine Father, we’d be happy to do it.” I said, “Oh no, no, no, no. The only way you’re going to do it is if I pay you.” “Oh no, Father, we owe you a lot.” I said, “No, no, no. You don’t owe me anything, but I recognize your skill and I have a professional responsibility never to take advantage of anybody and I won’t. The only way you’ll do it is if I pay you and your help.” They had to agree to that. They told me what stone to get and where to get it and I bought it and I got them to do it. Ever since, people have commented on the magnificent job and, “How could you do it so perfectly?” Those were the two pachucos. Those were the rejects of society. I hope you get the message.
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