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Fr. Larry Snyder

2014 Annual Gathering Opening Address
(remarks as prepared for delivery)
Charlotte, North Carolina




Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Sister Linda, for that kind introduction. It is
my pleasure to welcome you all to the Catholic Charities USA 2014 Annual
Gathering!

We come together as colleagues who make up the most amazing network in this
country. We come together as old friends and friends just waiting to be introduced.
We come together as a network united in purpose, in passion, and in a bond of
working for the common good no matter what the challenge. And because we are a
sacramental people, we come together to celebrate our service to the little ones among
us, to refresh our practice with a common creativity that will benefit those we serve,
and to recognize the presence of God in all of usa God who has entrusted us with
the care of those who are closest to him, the ones who are poor, marginalized,
hungry, who dont have a place to call home.

We know this is a treasure that we cherish and a sacred trust that we hold reverently.
So let this Annual Gathering of Catholic Charities begin and let it be a time of joy,
rejuvenation and professional challenge for all of us.

Let me begin by saying a huge Thank You to our hosts this year: Catholic Charities
of the Diocese of Charlotte and their Executive Director, Dr. Gerry Carter. Already
and through these next several days, we will be treated royally and so we want you to
know our gratitude for all the work that entails. To you and to the planning team
who have put together a great program, we thank you.
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This year, we are celebrating the 104
th
year of our national network: 104 years of
working together to serve those in need in the most professional and faith-filled
manner we can, as we strive to be the pre-eminent Catholic service network pursuing
both true charity and authentic justice.

This year also marks my tenth Annual Gathering as the leader of this amazing
network and so it has a special significance for me since in a few months I will be
moving on to the next challenge of my life at the University of St. Thomas in
Minnesota.

So allow me to reminisce for just a bit. In the last ten years I have visited almost
every state in the union. My office is full of mementoes that local agencies have given
me that are a daily reminder of the many places I have been, and more importantly, a
reminder of the incredible work of our agencies that I have witnessed. Since many of
you have never been to my office, I thought I would begin by sharing some of these
mementoes with you.

First of all, let me say that some of the gifts I was given were meant to be enjoyed.
Like the gift of Cajun spices called Slap Yo Mama from St. Charles, Louisiana. This
means that when your mama uses these spices, the food is going to taste so good that
you will want to slap her, which is colloquial for give her a big hug. Or while I was in
Wichita, Kansas, I received a basket of local delicacies. One of them was Microwave
Popcorn on the Cob. I kid you not: it had an actual corn cob in the microwave bag
with a warning that the cob will be very hot. I did try it, but Im not sure that it is an
idea whose time has comeor that it ever will.

To get a little more serious, one of my most treasured items is this wall hanging. It
may not look like much to you, but it is constructed out of wood and tin from houses
that were destroyed in the lower 9
th
ward of New Orleans. To me, it represents the
pain and the hope and the resilience of the human spirit that I was privileged to
witness after Hurricane Katrina.

These two memorial bells come from the same experience. They were given to me
by Miss Helen Brown of New Orleans who collected them. Miss Helen was our
volunteer of the year in 2005. She could not accept the award because in the
evacuation of the city just a few weeks before our Annual Gathering, no one knew
what happened to her. Several months later she was able to communicate and let
people know that she had been taken to a nursing home in New England. She had a
harrowing experience of being taken to the New Orleans airport which was the
hospice center for those who might not live through the evacuation. But she did
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survive and made it back to the city. I went to New Orleans to present her with her
award and at that time she gave me these two memorial bells that I will treasure.

This dove is from the Holy Land and is a lamp that burns olive oil. Originally it came
from Joe Duffy and Catholic Charities of Paterson. Now it has a greater reminder to
me of the partnership that we have forged with Bethlehem University. This
university, the only Christian university in Palestine, is a beacon of hope in a land of
conflict and challenge. It reminds me of the faces of the student interns who graced
us with their presence and never-failing smiles and also of our agencies who
welcomed them and made them family.

Those of you who were in St. Louis for the Annual Gathering in 2012 might
remember this ball. I threw it out as the opening pitch of the baseball game between
the Cardinals and the Nationals. No one was more surprised than I that it actually
made it across home plate without bouncing. It reminds me of the importance of our
Annual Gatherings and convenings and the positive energy that we all gain from
them.

The plaque with the simple word Namaste which means The God in me greets the
God in you. The Spirit in me meets the same Spirit in you was a gift from our
agency in San Bernadino and its director Ken Sawa. Every day it reminds of the
friendship and confidence which so many of you placed in me as I strove to perform
my job.

Finally, I want to show you two gifts that are treasures in their own right. The first
was given to me by Catholic Charities Rapid City and its director Jim Kinyon. It is a
depiction of Christ as a native American wrapped in a beautiful Navajo blanket. It is a
reminder of the great diversity of the people that our member agencies serve and that
in each one of them we can recognize the face of Christ.

The other is a second edition volume from 1889 of the Life of Pope Leo XIII, the
pope who began Catholic Social Teaching with his encyclical Rerum novarum. It was
given to me by Pat Wiele, a board member from Catholic Charities Santa Rosa. It was
actually written by her great-great uncle, Msgr. Bernard OReilly. It had to be sent
from London because it was the only copy she could find. It was not only a very
thoughtful gift that matched the hospitality I enjoyed there, but a gift that causes me
to reflect on the rich tradition of our faith and the tremendous resource of years of
Catholic social teaching.

These mementoes tell great stories and remind me of not only the friends Ive made
and amazing individuals Ive had the privilege to meet in my ten years, but also are a
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constant reminder of what I call Catholic Charities moments when the promise of
our mission and the power of our network to truly do good and bring about a society
that cares for all of Gods children is made crystal-clear.

Perhaps some of you have experienced this when a family returns to an agency years
after being helped with rental assistance and proudly shows off the keys to their new
house. When a young man speaks about the mentorship of a Catholic Charities
worker that helped him become the first in his family to attend college. When a child
whose family situation is unstable bursts into delighted laughter when shes given a
doll of her very own at a Catholic Charities child care center. These Catholic
Charities moments can be large or small, but are always a humbling reminder of what
can happen when people inspired by the Gospel dedicate their lives to serving those
in need.

For my part, my decade at CCUSA has been marked with many Catholic Charities
moments that I will always carry with me in my heart, some of which I would like to
share with you now. The first will always be how this network came together to
respond to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The city of New Orleans under water; over
one million people displaced. It was a scene we had never seen before, and so we
responded in a way and scope that we had never done. Following the lead of our
local agencies, especially New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Biloxi, we put together a
response that has become the blue-print to build a renewed disaster response office.
That was a Catholic Charities moment.

Earlier this year, I was in McAllen, Texas where I witnessed how our agencies are
responding to the ongoing crisis of unaccompanied children coming to our southern
border. When the scale of the situation became clear, Sr. Norma Pimentel and her
team in Brownsville, Texas pulled together a welcome center in a matter of just a few
days that offers safety, food, clean clothes and a shower, a medical check-up and
information about how to get to their destination and what to expect. Regularly a
trolley would arrive at the center, bringing another group of arrivals who had been on
the move for several weeks, feeling exhausted, frequently discouraged, and maybe
even a little less than human.

Whenever the trolley arrived, everyone would drop what they were doing, go to the
entrance and greet those arriving by clapping and yelling Bienvenidos! The
outpouring of care for each and every one of those arriving on the trolley was tangible
and inspiring; for many, the response was simply tears. That was a Catholic Charities
moment.

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A couple of weeks ago, I visited our agency in Santa Rosa, California, to meet with the
Board who were doing strategic planning and then to present an in-service for the
staff. When JennieLynn Holmes was giving the report about social services she told
the Board that now every client in the agency had an Individual Opportunity Plan.
After years of exploring the idea of creating these individualized road maps for people
in need from the federal level, it was so inspiring and gratifying to hear that Catholic
Charities in Santa Rosa is pressing forward to make them a reality, and I salute
Jennielynn, Brendan, and Allie for making that happen. I couldnt help but think of
the clients who will come away from a visit to Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa with a
personalized road map with goals and targets to help them get out of poverty. It was a
Catholic Charities moment.

I could spend this whole speech recounting powerful and humbling Catholic Charities
moments through my career, and I know that you all have experienced these
moments of clarity and inspiration throughout your career as well. But the point of
this talk, and certainly the point of this gathering, is not to succumb to nostalgia or to
only look back and focus on where we have come from. Rather, this time together is a
chance to stand together and look towards the future, to change the pace, set a new
course, address contemporary challenges, and seize the opportunities presented to us.

Of course, our network finds its inspiration and reason for being at the heart of Jesus
teachings. The Gospels are a narrative of how Christ kept reaching out to the edges
of society, to the marginalized, and bringing them to the center, restoring them and
including them by healing them, forgiving their sins and loving them. This was key to
his ministry of transforming the reality of the world into the kingdom of God.
2,000 years later, the same message holds true.

Pope Francis constantly reminds us to be witnesses to that Gospel message in society
and his leadership exemplifies what it means to take the love of God to the sick, the
suffering and the rejected. He encourages us to go into the dirtiness of the streets,
into the messiness of life, to be with the sheep. If we do this, Pope Francis tells us, we
will smell like the sheep. My friends, please take this the correct way when I tell you
that you smell like the sheep.

I know that when you go out of your way to make sure a client has a way to get to
work, stay after hours to support a family in need, or listen to someone who doesnt
feel like they have anyone else to talk to, you may not feel like you are being heroic,
that you are simply living out the mission that is Catholic Charities. But when I look at
this room, when I think of the Catholic Charities moments that still stick with me
ten years later, when I visit agencies across the U.S., I see a network of dedicated
servants who accompany the poor and the forgotten on their journey to hope and
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self-sufficiency. And from the Gospel, through our years of history as a Church, to
our last 104 years as a national network, all of our foundational documents challenge
us to do this in new and ever-more effective ways.

When I accepted this position ten years ago, one of the first things I did was to go
back and read the accounts of the first meetings of the National Conference of
Catholic Charities, as we used to be known, and the writings of our first leaders: Msgr.
Kerby and Msgr. OGrady. Out of a clear need in this immigrant country, they
crafted the vision of the value of a national network, what benefits it could provide,
and what it might look like. I studied the Cadre Report, the theological and practical
formulation of Catholic Charities response to the Second Vatican Council and the
social upheaval of the 1960s. And closer to our time, I looked again at the
documents of Vision 2000.

My friends, we are an organization and a network whose foundation is the Gospel.
But these other documents define our specific organizational vision in terms that try
to concretize the Gospel demands to todays context, especially as it relates to the
poor, vulnerable and marginalized in our society today.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI told us in Deus caritas est that we must be committed to
the best professional development that is possible for us because the poor deserve
nothing less. But he goes on to say that just as important is our commitment to a
conversion of the heart.

That is why it is so important for our member agencies to at least once a year spend
time reflecting on the mission, on Catholic social teaching and the values that unite us
in our work. In gatherings like this, where we can come together to deeply ground
ourselves in our shared identity as a network, we gain new skills and techniques to
improve how we serve those who come to us in need.

The challenge of any leader is to take the vision of the organizations founders and
mission and turn that into a solid path forward. Over the past ten years, my
understanding of and goals for our work together were not things I came up with on
my own. For the past ten years I have tried to keep us faithful to the Gospel and to
that vision which we have received from our earliest days. Thank you for walking
with me on that amazing journey of putting faith into action. I am so incredibly
blessed.

As we look to the future and examine how to build and strengthen our presence as
service providers, there are several principles that have pointed our way these past
several years. After a year of listening to you as part of our centennial year, three
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principles were formulated to guide our work. The first is Systems changing
because the status quo is not good enough. Rather than a cookie cutter approach that
does not respect the unique assets and needs of each individual, we need Individual
Opportunity Plans, just like Santa Rosa is doing right now.

A second principle is market driven because we need to engage the corporate sector
to use their creativity to design products more friendly to the economically challenged,
and because we need more corporate structures that directly impact the common
good like B corporations that is, community benefit corporations.

And finally, results oriented, because in order to be good stewards of the
investment that our donors place in us, we have to hold ourselves accountable not
only for our outputs but also for our outcomes. As youve heard me say before, if our
goal is to fill shelter beds, as admirable as that is, we have the wrong goal.

Our goal needs to be getting people out of poverty, accompanying them on their
journey to change the course of their life and make the most of their God-given
potential. We know that we are called to do more than just help people survive, but to
help them thrive and we need to measure our ability to do that and hold ourselves
accountable.

To me, this is not some discouraging goal with little chance of success. To me, this is
an opportunity to be creative, to have a greater impact and to shape a society where
everyone truly matters. To some, our goals will seem quixotic, chasing after
windmills. But I would say we have signs of the path already.

One of these signposts along the way is the Laboratory for Economic Opportunity, or
LEO, a direct result of our Alliance with the University of Notre Dame. I have to
give special mention to the founders from the Department of Economics, Professor
Bill Evans and Professor Jim Sullivan, who are not only widely respected in their field,
but who animate LEO with their passion for this work and use the tools of social
science to create a brighter future for those less fortunate.

They are working with a handful of our agencies that are running innovative programs
in order to analyze, quantify, and measure what works and what doesnt. Their results
will have the ability to directly impact how we design our programs, guide where we
put our resources, and illuminate a scalable path forward based on proven results. I
am excited that they are giving the plenary session tomorrow morning and letting us
all glimpse how their work is going.

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Several of you are also beginning to work in the area of social innovation or social
entrepreneurship. The cynical may say that this is just a way to replace funding
sources that are drying up or becoming problematic. It is actually an opportunity for
us to do job development for our difficult to employ clients rather than depend on
the market place that has far too often abandoned these people in their need, and is a
new way of envisioning how not-for-profit agencies can create economic opportunity
in the 21
st
century.

For the past two years, the Social Innovation Boot Camp at Notre Dame has been an
intense exercise to participating agencies to get needed feedback about their program
design and chance of success in the for-profit world. Some ideas have been
maintenance services (and we all need that!), furniture exchanges, a knitting
cooperative, a farming cooperative, and now Crisp, a mobile grocery delivery
service in the food deserts of Chicago. I salute all of you. This requires creativity, risk
and financial investment but is certainly worth the pay-off in peoples lives.

These examples, and many others, reassure me that the Catholic Charities network is
well positioned for the future. Some might grow discouraged that we havent made
more progress reducing poverty or creating a society where all can thrive. There is
doubtless much work that needs to be done. But I firmly believe this time of crisis,
with 45 million Americans living at or below the federal poverty line, can be and
already is a time of great creativity and energy for the long road ahead.

But in all of this we must remember that our Charter way back in 1910 called on us to
be the attorney for the poor. Throughout our history the Catholic Charities
movement has taken those words very seriously and tried to be the voice for those
who have no voice in our society. We can be rightly proud that our efforts in previous
decades helped shape and pass the Social Security Act and the Housing Act.

Today we continue to work with both sides of the aisle to pass legislation that
improves the way that we provide for those in need. It was very gratifying to hear
Rep. Paul Ryan in several media interviews credit Catholic Charities with convincing
him of the value and need for case management.

Perhaps we are living in a different sort of Catholic Charities moment one when
our network can help lead the way in cutting through the political polarization, come
forth with new ideas, and shape a society in which every individual is treated with the
dignity of a child of God and given the opportunity to thrive. We walk on the
shoulders of the giants who have led us in the past. I would say to you that success
will be ours if we stay faithful to the mission. Success will be ours if we recognize that
Gods hand is at work in all that we do.
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As I have done so often, let me end by quoting Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul at
the turn of the 20
th
century who reminded his fellow bishops that we need not spend
a lot of time fretting about what the future will bring because, in the end, As we will
it, so shall the future be.

My friends, please know that all of you who are here, and everyone in the Catholic
Charities network, will always remain close to my heart and in my prayers. Thank you,
may God bless you and your work, and please know that I have treasured every
Catholic Charities moment we have shared together. May God who has begun this
great work in us bring it to fruition. Amen.