Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, talks about the role of religion in politics and the dangers when politicians inappropriately use religion.
Author Archives: Fred Yi
Catholic Writer Ron Hansen
RON HANSEN: A reading of the holy Gospel according to Matthew.
CONGREGATION: Glory be to our Lord.
BOB FAW, correspondent: Nearly every day, as he has for most of his adult life, Ron Hansen attends Mass. For this deacon at Saint Joseph of Cupertino parish in California, the ceremony brings both comfort and renewal.
RON HANSEN: I find nourishment in it. It’s a way of being quiet for a while and to let my mind focus on just communication with God.
FAW: Hansen’s religious sensibility isn’t limited to rituals like this. It also infuses all eight novels written by this highly acclaimed author.
(to Hansen): You really do see writing as a kind of sacrament then, don’t you?
HANSEN: Yes, it’s a witness to what God is doing in the world. We’re supposed to worship and praise, and I can’t think of a better way of worshiping and praising than to write poetry or fiction.
Scott: (from television film “Missing Pieces”): “Why? Why did you have to come?”
Atticus: “Because you are my son.”
FAW: “Missing Pieces,” for example, is the made-for-TV movie of Hansen’s novel Atticus, the story of both mystery and the parable of the prodigal son.
HANSEN: I started with the idea of my grandfather and really of God walking on earth. I thought of Atticus as a God figure, because the prodigal son story is of a God figure and human being figure.
Atticus: My, my, my.
FAW: Hansen’s Assassination of Jesse James explores the relationship between the legendary outlaw played in the film adaptation by Brad Pitt.
Jesse James: (from the film “Assassination of Jesse James”) “Open that safe.”
FAW: And Bob Ford, an outlaw who once worshiped James.
Jesse James: “I can’t figure you out. You want to be like me, or do you want to be me?”
HANSEN: It’s about hero worship and how you kill the things you love. I think Buddha once said you must kill all your teachers, and that’s what I think was going on with Bob Ford and Jesse James.
FAW: And Hansen draws on the biblical story of Cain and Abel when Bob Ford shoots Jesse James in the back. Ford, who expected to be praised for that, was instead reviled.
HANSEN: How do you become for a short time a hero and then become one of the most loathsome personalities in the world?
FAW: Like Cain, a “fugitive and a vagabond on the earth.”
HANSEN: Right, yes. But I wanted to have a sense of how do you, once you’ve done that, how do you redeem yourself?
FAW: Does Bob Ford really find redemption?
HANSEN: He doesn’t. No.
FAW: Ron Hansen grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, along with his twin brother and three sisters in a Catholic household. He graduated from Creighton University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he studied with John Irving and John Cheever.
(to Hansen): Do you have a favorite? Can an author have a favorite? Is it like a child?
HANSEN: It’s like a child.
FAW: You can’t.
HANSEN: Yeah. Probably Mariette is my favorite.
FAW: Hansen does extensive research for each novel. One of his best known, Mariette in Ecstasy, was based in part on two saints who lived in Europe in the 1800s. Mariette in Ecstasy is the story of a beautiful nun who bears the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, and who is banished from her order.
HANSEN: I developed this idea of the stigmata as a kind of metaphor for a passionate love affair with Christ, and that was the stumbling block for the other nuns. And I wanted to have at the heart of it a kind of questionableness, so you could read it all the way through and say, “She’s making this up,” or you could say, “She’s the real thing.” I didn’t want to come down one way or the other. My own impression was that she was the real thing.
FAW: But perhaps the clearest sense of Hansen’s own faith is in his novel Exiles. with its gripping portrait of the priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found God and was still tormented.
HANSEN: I loved his poetry, I loved his language, and I loved the fact that he was miserable. At the same time he discovered that he could bring in his poetry and make it a reflection of his spirituality.
FAW: Hansen, a talented painter, didn’t just paint a portrait of Hopkins and study his poetry.
(to Hansen): You said at some point that you have actually prayed to him…
HANSEN: Yes.
FAW: …and have been answered.
HANSEN: Yes. I’ve prayed to Thomas Merton. I’ve prayed to a lot of people who have died, just because I knew them better.
FAW: And you invoke their name at the outset of the prayer?
HANSEN: No. I just imagine them sitting there opposite me, talking just as I am to you and try to express what’s going wrong or what I need an answer to, and sometimes they give me the answers.
FAW: Hansen, once the deacon at Santa Clara Mission on the campus of the Jesuit college Santa Clara University, has been teaching English and creative writing there for the last 16 years. He is no fan of so-called “Christian fiction,” which Hansen says “is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing.” That’s not for him.
HANSEN: I’m trying to pass on the good news, and it might not necessarily be the good news of Jesus Christ but it might be the good news of this beautiful world we live in and how we can make it better. So that’s the evangelism I’m looking for. I’m trying to change people in subtle ways, but not to convert them.
FAW: He says faith-inspired fiction and religion can go hand in hand because each faces what he calls “the imponderables of life.”
(to Hansen): You say fiction and religion often share the same goals?
HANSEN: Yes.
FAW: In what way?
HANSEN: Essentially fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons.
(to his wife): I’ve got that Juno Diaz book to read on the plane…
FAW: Now 63, Hansen is happily married to writer Bo Caldwell, whose novel City of Tranquil Light was inspired by her missionary grandparents.
If you think Ron Hansen’s role as a Roman Catholic deacon and as author of racy, sometimes salacious material might conflict, well, think again.
HANSEN: Fiction has to do that story, has to do the story of people making terrible mistakes and seeing how it could have been different or how they came out of it in a positive way. And that’s what the role of religion is, to do exactly the same thing.
FAW: From Jesse James then, to a beautiful nun, from Atticus to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hansen says he has come to believe that religion need not be sack cloth and ashes.
HANSEN: That’s definitely not what God is looking for. God is looking for a connection, one on oneness with people. That feeling of God watching over you and loving you and embracing you and having that connection–that’s very rewarding, and that’s what gives people steel so they can stand all the terrible things that might happen in a person’s life.
FAW: Reflections of a Catholic deacon who entertains as he evangelizes, uniting the worlds of fiction and faith.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Cupertino, California.
Cardinal Carlo Martini
BOB ABERNETHY, host: Cardinal Carlo Martini, former Archbishop of Milan, died last week from Parkinson’s disease. He was 85 years old, a Jesuit, biblical scholar, sometimes mentioned as a future pope. He was known as a rare liberal voice in the Catholic hierarchy. One of the cardinal’s many friends was the scholar and writer Harvey Cox. He is the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. Professor Cox, welcome.
PROFESSOR HARVEY COX (Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard University): Thank you. Glad to be here.
ABERNETHY: As you remember your friend Cardinal Martini, what stands out? What were his outstanding characteristics for you?
COX: The first thing that comes to mind is the kind of graciousness, intelligence. He was a scholar before he was a bishop or an archbishop or a cardinal. Enormous curiosity; his eagerness and willingness to listen all around to all different kinds of people and to learn, but mainly I think just the word “grace.” You know, it’s customary to call bishops, I think, “Your Grace.” Sometimes it fits, and sometimes it doesn’t, but with Martini it certainly did. He was a gracious and open and personable man.
ABERNETHY: And in a gentle way, you have said, I think, in a gentle way, pretty critical of the Catholic Church. He told an interviewer a few weeks ago, I read, that he thought the Church was 200 years behind the times. How did he want it to change?
COX: Yes, one of his great gifts, I think, was to be thoughtfully critical without being polemical. He could raise issues in a way that didn’t make him any enemies, but he had a lot of interests in, first of all, his main big interest was to what he called decentralize a church which has become enormously Rome-centered in the last 200 years or so of Catholic history and to enlist the energy and creativity of all the different parts of the world. The Catholic Church is a universal church. There are Catholics on every continent now with growing numbers in Africa and Asia.
ABERNETHY: He also proposed discussion at least of some really controversial matters such as ordaining women deacons, or no longer requiring priests to be celibate.
COX: That’s right. He wanted to at least raise the question for further discussion about priestly celibacy, about required priestly celibacy, about women as deacons, about conversations with other religious traditions in a more serious way. But my point is that he had these positions, but he had them in a way that was persuasive and open and always in the tone of inviting discussion and not staking out a position. I think that was Martini’s great strength.
ABERNETHY: Did he seem to you the last liberal cardinal in the Catholic hierarchy?
COX: You know, I think in some ways the word “liberal” doesn’t quite capture Martini. He avoided labels, and he wanted to be a voice in the Church for a very large segment, he thought, of the Church and not just one little, tiny wing. I would call it the open, ecumenical, forward-looking, visionary wing of the Church that doesn’t always just look back to the way it was, but has a vision for the future. That was really his strength.
ABERNETHY: And, quickly, what was the Vatican reaction to these suggestions that he made? Did they think that he was kind of off the reservation?
COX: It was pretty much to ignore them. He was never overtly disciplined or condemned. He was always listened to, but nothing really ever happened, and I think that was because the direction that the leadership of the Church was going in Rome at the time was not in accord with many of the ideas that Martini had, alas.
ABERNETHY: Harvey Cox of Harvard University, many thanks.
COX: You’re welcome.
Harvey Cox Extended Interview
Watch more of a wide-ranging conversation about the legacy of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and the future of the Catholic Church.
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Tim Kaine: Democrats and Religious Outreach
On August 23, Democratic US Senate candidate in Virginia and former Virginia governor Tim Kaine spoke at Floris United Methodist Church in Herndon, Virginia about issues of faith and public policy. Listen to Kaine, a Roman Catholic, describe working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras, presiding over executions despite his faith-based opposition to the death penalty, and practicing faith-based environmental stewardship. In an interview with R&E, Kaine also explains why Democrats only seem to be less adept than Republicans at religious outreach.
RNC 2012: Catholic Republicans on Religious Liberty and the Budget
Watch more of Kim Lawton’s interviews with former US Ambassador to the Vatican and co-chair of Catholics for Romney Jim Nicholson, and Maureen Ferguson, senior policy advisor with the Catholic Association, who talk about what on the Romney-Ryan agenda resonates with Catholics; Catholic religious liberty concerns over the Obama administration’s health care mandate that requires employers provide contraceptive services free of charge; and debate about whether proposed budget cuts to federal programs will hurt the poor and violate Catholic social teaching.
For more of our coverage of the 2012 Republican National Convention, visit our ONE NATION: RELIGION & POLITICS blog.
RNC 2012: Delegates on Faith and Politics
Faith-based delegates to the 2012 Republican National Convention talk about how their religious beliefs motivate their politics, what issues they believe are most important this election, and the role they think faith-based voters should play. In order of appearance: Rev. Bob Palisin, retired pastor, Presbyterian Church USA, and alternate delegate from North Carolina; Richard Hayes, Roman Catholic delegate from Texas and Margaret Stoldorf, evangelical delegate and county chair of the Republican Party of Iowa.
For more of our coverage of the 2012 Republican National Convention, visit our ONE NATION: RELIGION & POLITICS blog.
Religion and the Republican Convention
KIM LAWTON, correspondent. In accepting the Republican nomination for president Thursday, Governor Mitt Romney talked more personally about his religion than he has so far on the campaign trail. Describing his background, Romney specifically mentioned his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
MITT ROMNEY (speaking at convention): We were Mormons and growing up in Michigan; that might have seemed unusual or out of place but I really don’t remember it that way. My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to.
LAWTON: In the 1980s, Romney was bishop for a Mormon congregation in suburban Boston. In the LDS tradition, a bishop is similar to a pastor. He oversaw other churches as well.
ROMNEY: We had remarkably vibrant and diverse congregations from all walks of life and many who were new to America. We prayed together, our kids played together and we always stood ready to help each other out in different ways. That’s how it is in America. We look to our communities, our faiths, our families for our joy, our support, in good times and bad.
LAWTON: Earlier in the evening, fellow church members talked at length about Romney’s devotion, his compassion, and his service. Grant Bennett succeeded Romney as pastor.
GRANT BENNETT (Church leader): Mitt didn’t discuss questions of theology. He found the definition of religion given by James in the New Testament to be a practical guide: “Pure religion is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction.”
LAWTON: On Wednesday night, vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, a Roman Catholic, linked his own faith with Romney’s.
REP. PAUL RYAN: Our faiths come together in the same moral creed. We believe that in every life there is goodness; for every person, there is hope. Each one of us was made for a reason, bearing the image and likeness of the Lord of life.
LAWTON: Prior to this week, there had been few explicit references to Romney’s Mormonism from the campaign. And there has been intense debate about whether the topic should be addressed head on. According to the Pew Research Center, half of all Americans say it doesn’t bother them when politicians talk about how religious they are. Two-thirds of Americans say it is important to have a president with strong religious beliefs. And among Republicans, that number jumps to more than 80 percent.
Mark DeMoss is an evangelical and a close Romney advisor on faith issues. He says he’s been impressed by the depth of Romney’s religious beliefs.
MARK DEMOSS (Romney Advisor): This is a really rock-solid faith that I think guides this man when he wakes up until he goes to bed.
DeMOSS (in speech): I trust his character, his integrity, his moral compass. And finally I trust his values, for I’m fully convinced that they mirror my own values.
LAWTON: For the last six years, DeMoss has been trying to enlist other evangelicals to the Romney cause, including those who say they don’t want to vote for a Mormon because they don’t consider Mormons to be fellow Christians.
DeMOSS: The same people that will say that would have no problem letting a doctor of a different faith do open heart surgery on them, will fly on an airplane piloted by a pilot of a different faith and then suddenly say “But I can’t vote for a president of a different faith.”
LAWTON: Republicans need the enthusiastic support of evangelicals, who make up more than a quarter of the GOP coalition. Ralph Reed, president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, says it’s wrong to think that evangelicals would be upset because there are no Protestants on the GOP ticket.
RALPH REED (Faith & Freedom Coalition): They are very sophisticated. They understand that there are many candidates who are Jews, who are Mormons, who are Catholics who may not share their theology, who share their values, and they’ll vote for them and work for them and I think they’re going to do that for Ryan and Romney.
LAWTON: The Faith and Freedom Coalition held a high-profile rally to kick off the convention. Numerous speakers used religious issues to rally support for Romney.
NEWT GINGRICH (in speech): Unlike Barack Obama, he actually understands that the basis of our liberty is the grant from God, and that no government can come between God and man.
LAWTON: Reed outlined an ambitious strategy to target 17 million evangelicals who he says didn’t vote in the last presidential election.
REED (in speech): We going to mail them, we’re going to text them, we’re going to email them, we’re going to phone them, and if they haven’t voted by November 6, we’re going to get in the car and we’re going to drive to their house and we’re going to get them to the polls.
REED: In 2008, the Obama campaign and the left really out-hustled us and did so very badly. But not any more.
LAWTON: Another key group will be Catholics. In the last election, a slight majority of Catholics voted for President Obama. In most recent elections, the presidential candidate who won the most Catholic votes won the election. Many Catholics here at the convention said there’s a lot of pride in the fact that former altar boy Paul Ryan is the vice-presidential candidate. They say the Romney-Ryan ticket offers much that resonates with their community.
MAUREEN FERGUSON (The Catholic Association): There are certain core, fundamental issues to our faith and that is the right to life, the right to religious liberty to practice our faith free from government interference, and the defense of marriage and not the redefinition of marriage and family. These are core issues that are fundamental to our faith that we must consider as Catholics to be primary in terms of deciding for whom we’re going to vote.
LAWTON: There were several convention events to celebrate the party’s traditional stands on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But even the most socially conservative delegates acknowledged that economic issues will, and should, dominate this election.
MARGARET STOLDORF (Iowa Delegate): The moral fabric of our lives is intertwined with the economy, and I do not believe that we the people, the government needs to or feel compelled to support every living being.
RICHARD HAYES (Texas Delegate): We spend too much money, and it’s hurting us, and it’s hurting us not only personally but globally.
LAWTON: The Tea Party, which has significant religious support, had an active presence here. Various Tea Party affiliates held a unity rally at local evangelical megachurch.
REP. MICHELE BACHMANN: These concepts–taxed enough already, don’t spend more than what you take in and follow the Constitution–are now a part of the Republican Party platform thanks to the Tea Party.
LAWTON: Over the past several months, many in the moderate and liberal faith communities have raised concerns that cuts to social programs in Ryan’s proposed budget would hurt the poor. And some Catholics in particular, took issue with Ryan using Catholic social teaching to defend his plan. But former Ambassador to the Vatican and Catholics for Ryan co-chair Jim Nicholson defended Ryan.
AMB. JIM NICHOLSON (Catholics for Romney): I think Ryan shows a great of deal of compassion really, a real Catholic value, because of the things he wants to change so that there will be sustainability in these programs and help the people who really need it, so that we can afford it out there when our children and grandchildren are out there and some of them who will need help probably.
LAWTON: Still, many in the faith community continued issuing challenges to the Republicans’ economic plans. The progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc was in Tampa calling for the wealthy to pay more taxes.
ELLIE AXE (Bend the Arc): We’re representing a Jewish community that cares a lot about social and economic justice. And what that means for us right now is that we believe that the top two percent earners should pay their fair share in taxes.
LAWTON: Rev. Samuel Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
REV. SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference): We can’t neglect the poor. Now I’m not referencing the idea of government dependency for the rest of your life. Neither am I an advocate of perpetual entitlement. But there is a responsibility the government must take, and that responsibility is to take care of those that can’t take care of themselves.
LAWTON: Rodriguez has not endorsed either candidate, but offered the benediction on Tuesday night.
RODRIGUEZ: “Believing that God is not done with America, and America is not done with God…”
LAWTON: Both political conventions traditionally open and close each session with prayer. This year, those prayers turned unusually controversial after Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the US Catholic bishops, agreed to pray at the RNC. He later said he would also be praying at the DNC. Rodriguez says religious leaders shouldn’t shy away from appearing at events like this.
RODRIGUEZ: Our job is to contextualize a prophetic witness, to speak from truth, biblical truth, higher truth, spiritual truth. That transcends politics. With that being said, I think it’s fine if we can speak with integrity to both political parties addressing both platforms as it pertains to the concerns and the values that we hold near and dear.
LAWTON: While most of the faith-based rallying this week was Christian, Republican Jews also pledged to make more inroads in their heavily Democratic community. They say President Obama is particularly vulnerable on his policies toward Israel.
MATT BROOKS (Republican Jewish Coalition): For a segment of the Jewish community, that is a real problem and one of the reasons why we’re seeing a real deterioration of support in the Jewish community for President Obama.
LAWTON: In a tight election, outreach to every group becomes vital. But amid all the mobilization strategies, some said the larger religion story coming out of this convention should not get lost.
RODRIGUEZ: Here we are, America demonstrating to the world that we could have a Mormon president, with a Catholic vice-president, with strong evangelical support. How about that? You know you never could have written that story 20, 30, 40 years ago. But it conveys a message that religious pluralism trumps religious totalitarianism. And this is what makes America great.
LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Tampa.
Microloans and Microgrants
FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: The billboards and signs in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York, reflect dozens of languages, cultures, and nationalities. It’s an immigrant community of rich diversity, but also plenty of poverty. And there’s a store for that too: an American version of Bangladesh’s famous Grameen Bank.
No fancy lobby here—there aren’t even enough chairs. But from this and five other cramped quarters in Queens and as far away as Oakland, California, Grameen America disburses dozens of micro-business loans each day—most for around $1500, all of them to women. It is the brainchild of US-trained economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for success with microlending in his native Bangladesh. He wanted to prove the concept could work in a developed country. Using foundation grants and borrowing commercially under a federal community reinvestment law, Grameen America began in 2008—to wary customer reception.
STEPHEN VOGEL (CEO, Grameen America): They were afraid that what we were offering—a low-cost loan, no collateral, no credit scores, no history necessarily of being in business and we would give them a loan—they were afraid that there’d be something that was going to come back in the end. It would be we’ll raise the interest rates, we would do something. But we didn’t.
DE SAM LAZARO: But word spread quickly, he says. Already many borrowers, like Maria del Socorro, have paid off first and second Grameen loans. Del Socorro, a Colombia native who’d had only housekeeping jobs before, opened her decorations business. She’s fulfilling a life-long goal to turn her crafting skills into a business. Business is good and growing, she says.
MARIA DEL SOCORRO: (speaking in Spanish): It’s good. I do all kinds of events, like birthdays, first communions, weddings. All the foam work you see is done by hand, I do all of this by hand.
DE SAM LAZARO: She is among 11, 000 women who have received loans from Grameen America.
(speaking to Shah Newaz) : When you were starting out in Bangladesh working for Grameen, did you ever dream that you’d be working with poor people in the United States of America?
SHAH NEWAZ (Head of Operations, Grameen America): No. It is the world’s biggest—richest country of the world, and the formula we developed—that is the poorest country of the world.
VOGEL: The United States is a country that everyone thinks has money, doesn’t have any poor people. We have more than 45 million people living in poverty in the United States.
DE SAM LAZARO: And he says it takes much more than financing to help them break out of it: business counseling, keeping the books, paying bills, even opening savings accounts, which is required of borrowers. Even that is often not enough. Joe Selvaggio, a former Catholic priest who’s worked for decades with poor people, says many would-be entrepreneurs fail because their finances are precarious.
JOE SELVAGGIO (Founder and Co-Chair, MicroGrants): The car got impounded or they got sick or their kids got sick or the landlord, you know, there was a storm and, you know, they got some physical damage or something, you know, Setbacks happen to people so often. I remember one time we gave a check to somebody, and she put it in the bank, and she had so many bank overdrafts that she—it ate up almost the whole $1000 with bank overdraft charges.
DE SAM LAZARO: Selvaggio runs MicroGrants, a Minnesota nonprofit that works alongside those that provide microloans. But he says new entrepreneurs often need something more to get them over the hump. So he gives them grants of $1000. Several MicroGrants clients are in Midtown Global Market, located in a long-shuttered Sears Roebuck store in a recovering Minneapolis neighborhood.
SELVAGGIO: A lot of those places already had a $5000 loan for inventory that they can’t—they don’t want any more loans. They can’t make the cash flow, so $1000 injection of cash is really helpful.
LAURA SANCHEZ: We used the money for like to fix the store, depends what we need—like displays or decorations for the store, we used for that.
TRUNG PHAM: We used the MicroGrants dollars at the time for more signage and to redo our menu. Our menus before was not professional, was more of a homemade menu.
MARTIN AKINSEYE: I used it to purchase about 30 hand-made Senegalese drums which we use to offer free drum lessons every Sunday.
DE SAM LAZARO: Salvador de Montesinos works as a masseur and part-time cook to make ends meet. His $1000 grant brought him closer to the goal of earning a living as an artist. He was able to buy a machine to make prints, which are much easier to sell than his very high-priced originals.
SALVADOR DE MONTESINOS: This is $140. This is $70,000.
DE SAM LAZARO: Tell me that again?
DE MONTESINOS: $140, $70,000.
DE SAM LAZARO: Some day he hopes to live off sales of originals.
(speaking to De Montesinos): So you’ve sold three originals so far?
DE MONTESINOS: Yes.
DE SAM LAZARO: Over how many years?
DE MONTESINOS: All my life!
DE SAM LAZARO: Not surprisingly, he sells about ten times that number of prints per year.
One MicroGrants client who’s closer to her life-long goals is Shantae Holmes. She opened a laundromat in Minneapolis’s economically depressed north side two years ago, a community she’s deeply committed to.
SHANTAE HOLMES: I wanted a business that served a need, not a want. I didn’t want to compete with the cell phone places, I didn’t want to compete with red hair and fake hair and all that stuff. There is enough of that. I didn’t want the bargain clothing and the gym shoes.
DE SAM LAZARO: Her business began with small loans, but the real source of stability—and profit—come from a six-figure US Army contract to service a Minnesota-based unit. She got help from a local nonprofit that helps minority entrepreneurs.
JAMARA CHEEK: (Metropolitan Economic Development Association): She had no experience with government contracting. People are overwhelmed and daunted by government rules and regulations, and we literally held her hand and coached her through that process. It took four months after submitting an offer of her services to the government for her to hear back from them.
DE SAM LAZARO: However, the huge volume of new business required a commercial truck she could not afford. The $1000 down payment assistance from MicroGrants salvaged her major contract, she says.
HOLMES: It takes money to make money, so therefore it was like, oh, I need some help to get this piece that’s going to be able to get me my bills at a zero balance. I need to spend this first, and Joe came in and made it easy for me.
DE SAM LAZARO: For Selvaggio, Holmes is a star client—a 41-year-old mother of three who was able to turn around an earlier life of chemical dependency and cancer driven by talent that can be realized with a little help—and often faith. As for his own motivation, Selvaggio says it is Christianity in its purest form.
SELVAGGIO: Most of the people that we give money to, they put a lot of faith in their God, and I don’t have a lot—that kind of faith, but what Jesus was doing, that’s—I’m founded in that. You know, he was helping the poor, and I’m like Pope John XXIII. They asked him what he wanted to do with his papacy, and he said, well I’d like to see that the poor have a little less suffering in life.
DE SAM LAZARO: So far, Selvagio has disbursed more than $2 million in $1000 grants. He gets funds from foundation and many wealthy Minnesotans he got to know from his days as a priest.
SELVAGGIO: These are entrepreneurs that have made money, you know, on their own, and they appreciate the, you know, principles of responsibility, accountability, production, getting, you know, business principles of delivering a quality product on time at a reasonable price. So they know that I can find people like Shantae or ambitious people like Salvador that are going to sell their products and make money and, you know, it’s got to be tied to work.
DE SAM LAZARO: Grameen America’s CEO Vogel, himself a successful entrepreneur who also founded a private equity firm, says its critical that small enterprises be nurtured among low-income Americans. It’s not just the best bet for people in poverty, he says. It’s often the only option.
VOGEL: They can’t get a job. Jobs are very tight. Overtime is very tight. Many of our borrowers do have jobs. They have part-time jobs, and they’re using these business opportunities to increase their income.
DE SAM LAZARO: With its careful oversight and counseling, he says Grameen America’s loan repayment rate has been 99-plus percent—far better than anything seen in big commercial banks.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.
