Crying for the victims

Try as I might, I can’t get the mass shooting on Father’s Day in Southwest Philadelphia’s West African community out of my mind.

The party at Finnegan Playground, 68th and Grovers Avenue, was to celebrate recent graduates of area high schools. One man was killed and five injured, including four teens. A week earlier another man had been fatally shot a block away on row-houselined Dorel Street.

I think of those victims and want to cry.

You see, I grew up on 65th Street in that Southwest Philly neighborhood, a three-block walk from Finnegan Playground. My younger brother and I spent countless hours playing baseball and touch football at Finnegan.

We had friends on Dorel Street.

My girlfriend at the time lived close by at 69th and Dicks Avenue

My father worked at the sprawling General Electric Switchgear facility at 70th and Elmwood Avenue. Heavy industries like GE, Westinghouse, and Baldwin Locomotive were backbones of the local economy.

Violent crime was unheard of. Often, we forgot to lock our doors at night.

Many families were firstor second-generation Irish and Italian Catholic.

My family’s parish, St. Barnabas, was a block from our house.

I hadn’t revisited the neighborhood in decades. An invitation to a St. Barnabas parish reunion a half dozen years ago prompted my return.

Arriving on a crisp January Sunday morning, the neighborhood was simultaneously the same yet different. The sensation was one of passing through a once bustling town that had seen better days: quiet streets with little traffic, few pedestrians, abandoned cars, vacant storefronts, once lovingly maintained homes abandoned or in disrepair.

A cyclone fence surrounded the parish compound of church, elementary school, rectory and convent. Doors to parish buildings were locked.

St. Barnabas was no longer the St. Barnabas of my youth. Like the neighborhood, it was the same yet different.

Church and school are now missions.

Since 2013, the pastoral and clerical affairs of the church are no longer ministered by Philadelphia Diocesan priests, but by priests of the Neocatechumenal Way (“The Way”), an evangelical mission initiative.

The school, for decades staffed by Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters (IHM), is now part of the Independence Mission School system, which under an agreement with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia operates more than a dozen former parish schools in mostly inner-city Philadelphia. Most of the students are non-Catholic.

While the Mass evoked memories of Sunday Masses long ago, it was the students who hosted the school’s open house after Mass who impressed me most.

I wasn’t aware until that day that all the students were minorities, most Black. They were neatly dressed, polite, well-spoken, and eager to answer a visitor’s questions. In a word, delightful.

When quizzed about their lilting patois, I learned that they were emigrants from West African countries like the Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Mali, the same countries as the victims of the Father’s Day shooting.

I was equally impressed with their parents, especially the financial sacrifices they willingly make (working class bus drivers, etc.) to ensure that their children receive a good education in a safe environment. They touched my heart.

I thought too about the opprobrium their children suffer at the hands of peers who mock their dedication, hard work and willingness to play by the rules.

A conversation during lunch with a life-long parishioner brought me current. He explained that Southwest Philly is no longer the homogeneous community of years past but three distinct communities: The West African community; the diverse, blue-collar, law-abiding, community of whites and minorities; and a tiny criminal cadre that, not giving a damn about anyone but themselves, despoil the entire neighborhood.

I shook my head then. And now, each time I think about those families from half dozen years ago and the victims of that criminal cadre on Father’s Day, I want to cry.