Kensington Tour

St. Edward's Church - Faith, Politics, and Justice

This is an abandoned church that we took over, this is the old Saint Edward's Catholic Church.  Well, the archdiocese, a few years ago, decided to close down nine churches in the poorest areas, largely because they couldn't make enough money.   And so the community that relied on the Catholic Church to help provide some of the basic necessities of life no longer had that.  It isn’t only the businesses and the city that abandoned this neighborhood and these people.

There was a huge struggle that took place at this church, with the priest almost threatening to do a sit-in and get arrested, and the nuns not wanting to leave their convent. And they lost.

The church remained vacant for years… until the Kensington Welfare Rights Union came along.  We had a group of 63 homeless families, and they had been living at the tent city at 4th & Lehigh. Because of the weather and the rats, we moved them into the St.Edward's church.  We used the pews as beds and the confessionals as closets, and every Sunday we had interfaith services.  And there's a big bell up above, and whenever we would get in trouble and there was a chance that we would be evicted, we would ring the bell, and people from all around the community would come out and sit with us on the stairs and say there's no way that you're going to get rid of people.  Students came from colleges all over the area, especially a lot of students from Eastern College, which is a Christian school.

Seven priests came to evict us.  So, when we were inside that first day they said that we had to leave in 48 hours, that we had to find somewhere else to go. They came back the next day, and there was a huge crowd of people on the steps, including priests, nuns, and a lot of press.  We told them we didn’t have anywhere else to go and that we talked to God and He gave us permission to stay because He didn't want children sleeping on the streets.  We weren't evicted. 

So we then ended up staying in here for four months with these particular families. But of course, the archdiocese was still trying to get us out.  They cited insurance reasons and that kind of stuff.  But they couldn’t kick us out because it would have made the church look hypocritical, especially because the pope was in the United States that year talking about the church strengthening its commitment to the dignity of everyone, especially the poor.

We finally had to leave because it was too cold in the church.  In December we started to take over abandoned HUD houses.  And at the end of the struggle three families got permanent housing because private donors came forward to donate money.
The thing that you have to keep asking yourselves is, Why? Why would people have to move into an abandoned church with their children? And why, after tons of publicity, would nothing change about the situation? Is it because there wasn’t any place for these children and these women to go in Philadelphia? Right now in Philadelphia we're spending over a billion dollars on new stadiums.

Next: 4th & Lehigh: Story of a Struggle