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Healing Wounded Children
Catholic residential facilities struggle to fill the gaps in the
American system of care for troubled youngsters.

By Molly Mulqueen

They used to be called “orphanages,” the institutions that cared for children whose parents were unable to meet the responsibilities of raising them. But the term, “orphanage” came to be associated with the worst in institutional care, like the heart-wrenching image of Oliver Twist in the workhouse, begging the snarling overseer for another bowl of gruel.

Today, they are known as “residential care facilities” for children and young adults, and much more than just the name has changed. Most of the children who live in these facilities are not orphans in the traditional sense, but have been removed from their homes due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, violence, or extreme poverty. Their emotional wounds are broad and deep, and the results of that scarring can be seen in virtually every aspect of their behavior. Residential care facilities work hard at turning the lives of these children around, with a personalized program of intensive counseling and a solid education. If Charles Dickens walked into one of these facilities today he would not recognize his surroundings.

Some of the very best residential care facilities in the country have ties to the Catholic Church. The first orphanage in the United States was a Catholic institution, started by the Ursuline Sisters in Natchez, Mississippi in 1729. Over the next two centuries, other religious orders of men and women, mostly in urban areas, began to take in street children. The circumstances that left these children without parents to care for them read like a quick rundown of US history: Indian massacres; epidemics of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and other diseases; the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the World Wars; penniless immigrants who could not feed their children; the Depression.

By the 1960s, orphanages had fallen out of favor with the government departments charged with care of children and with family services in the 50 United States. They were replaced, by and large, by the foster care system, which was touted as a more personalized alternative to what was perceived as the hard-knock life of an institutional setting. Those who developed the foster care system acknowledged the vital importance of a safe, functional, family environment as the healthiest atmosphere for growing children, and so the new system was designed to provide exactly that sort of atmosphere. Foster care was also seen as a way for each state to meet the needs of growing numbers of children, at a fraction of the per capita cost that would have been required for institutional care.

“Through the years, that was the demise of orphanages across the land, because it’s a lot more expensive to keep a kid in a residential setting than it is to put a child in foster care,” said Father James J. Close, president of the Mercy Home for Boys and Girls in Chicago. The Mercy Home was founded by Father Louis Campbell in 1887 as a refuge for homeless immigrant boys in Chicago. The institution now operates two campuses which serve 95 abused, abandoned and neglected 11- to 19-year-old boys and girls, and soon will expand their combined capacity to accommodate 120 youngsters. The Mercy Home also maintains an “after-care” program for young adults through the age of 24 as a support structure to help them overcome their troubled backgrounds and succeed at independent living. Father Close, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, has been the president of Mercy Home since 1973.

Filling a particular need

Father Close explains that institutions like Mercy Home fill a vital role:

I personally believe that there’s a dire need for many more situations like ours because the reality is that a significant number of kids are failing in their placements in foster care. And that is not to be negative towards foster care . . . we have lots of great foster parents. But sometimes foster care is woefully inadequate for a particular kid. It is then, at that stage, that residential care comes in.

The need for residential care is enormous, Father Close added. “They could open up 10 more ‘Mercies’ in Chicago in the morning, and they could keep them full,” he says.

Father Close sees residential facilities like Mercy Home as the last step in a long line of options for the care of young children. As he explains it:

It is my own personal belief that the best place for a kid is obviously at home. And even if it is a broken family, they should still remain with one of the parents. And if that doesn’t work, then with a relative, and if not a relative, then the next step is foster care. And if it is a severe-needs child, it has got to be specialized foster care, and if that doesn’t work, then the child belongs in a residential setting. Those are the kids that we focus on.

However, the type of care that is best for the children may not be seen as a viable option by government authorities, Father Close points out:

A big problem in the country is, of course, the financial issue of many, many kids in foster care that absolutely don’t belong there, but it is cheaper for government to put them there. Even though it doesn’t meet the needs of the kids, it meets the budget of the state.

The foster care system

There are approximately half a million children in the foster care system in the United States. In every state in the union foster parents must be certified or licensed before they are allowed to accept children into their homes.

“[Foster parents] have to go through a process of approval,” explains Neomi Litongua, a supervisor in adoption and foster care for Catholic Charities of Delaware. “In Delaware, they can be married or single, must be in good health; we require that they go through a criminal background check; their home must meet fire and safety standards; and they need an income sufficient to meet their own needs, and not be dependent on board payments.”

The “board payments” to which Litongua refers are the funds paid to the foster parents by the state, in order to defray the living expenses of the foster children. The size of these payments has become a bitter point of contention in many states, particularly because some foster parents depend on the payments as a major source of their family income. If the payments are modest, and the families do not have adequate outside income, the “board payments” might be diverted to general household expenses, so that the foster children get short shrift. And to complicate matters, some states are frequently late with their board payments to foster parents, making it difficult for the families to maintain the proper level of care for the foster children—and to sustain the needs of the rest of the family.

Litongua says that in more than 20 years of experience supervising foster parents, she has not encountered many families that have been involved in the system for the sake of the board payments, because the state of Delaware simply does not pay well enough to make foster care a financially attractive option. In fact, she believes that most foster parents actually lose money.

“The figures for the board payments run from about $12.42 to $17.00 per diem to feed and clothe the children, depending on their age and the services they require,” Litongua reports. “Our experience is that they probably put out much more than the board payment from their own pockets.”

Once the children are placed in a foster home, most states require frequent visits by social workers to ensure the child’s welfare, but in a some cities, social workers have overwhelming case loads, and they cannot be terribly attentive to individual children. Foster parents are also required to attend ongoing training in most states, so that they will be better prepared for the serious problems the children who might be placed in their care may be experiencing. This training—and the ability of foster parents to cope with behavioral problems—is crucial to the success of the system. Many of the children living in foster care are moved from one household to another far more frequently than is healthy for them, because the foster parents are not equipped to deal with their emotional difficulties. Frequent moves to new foster homes can send some troubled youngsters into a downward spiral of emotional difficulty and destructive behavior.

Patterns of rejection

“Many, many of the kids that are in our population are kids that have had significant foster care experiences and failures,” reports Father Close. “It’s a rejection. They’ve been rejected yet again—by their birth parents, foster parents, by the state, all the way on down the line.”

But some children struggle even when they are placed in a good home. And for some children, a succession of foster homes—even good homes—might be less helpful than residential care.

“There’s always going to be good foster care, and there’s always going to be foster care that’s not so good,” according to Joe Campo, director of the St. Francis Home for Boys in Brooklyn, New York, which is operated by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. He continues:

I can give you an example: we have a young boy that we put in foster care because he was too young for our home, and he’s doing really very well with it. But he has been in three places in six years, whereas if he would have been here, he would have been in one place for that time. You don’t get bounced around here.

However, he doesn’t really get the attention that he needs and the reason for that is because there are three other children living in the house, and he always feels slighted because he’s not a biological child. That’s just the way he feels. When he is here with us—we take him on weekends because I have had one of his older brothers here for six years—he gets really full attention because everybody is the same here. And that helps them psychologically—when everybody is on the same level.

Since 1967, the St. Francis Home has cared for young men from age 16 into their early 20s. The maximum age for foster care is usually 17 or 18, so many of these young men have outgrown the system, but are not yet able to make their own way in the world. Some of them “washed out” of foster care and had been homeless for a time before coming to St. Francis. The requirements for the six young men currently living in the house are non-negotiable: they must be in school or have jobs or both; no drinking or drug use is allowed; there are strict curfews; they must do their share of the household chores; and Catholic or not, they must join the group at Mass on Sundays. (Many of the young men who come into the St. Francis Home from different religious backgrounds eventually make the decision to enter the Catholic Church.)

Unlike Neomi Litongua, Campo believes that it is “quite common” for foster parents to take children into their homes primarily in order to receive the state payments. Children might sense that their foster parents are motivated by the money; but at his own institution the youngsters have a very different understanding. “You can’t fool a kid, so when they’re in a place like the St. Francis Home, we don’t get state money, and they know that,” Campo observes. “What we do is strictly from the heart, and we depend on Divine Providence to help the young men out.”

“It’s a very lousy business to be in—there is no money in it—but you gain a child. I have two boys going back to college next semester,” Campo says proudly.

Boys Town today

Boys Town, USA, perhaps the most famous orphanage-turned-residential care facility in the country, runs its own extensive training sessions for the foster parents the institution recruits to work with the children there—a population which now includes girls as well as boys. Boys Town foster parents have 40 to 50 hours of training before they even have a child in their home, and have 24-hour on-call support services available to them thereafter.

Boys Town has expanded from its original location near Omaha, Nebraska to operate 18 sites in 15 states and the District of Columbia. There are several different programs for youngsters, aged 8 to 18, based on the severity of their problems—which range from trouble in school to serious juvenile crime. All of the programs are patterned after the daily life of a traditional family, and each residential unit is known as a “family.”

“We employ married couples, professionally trained,” explains Father Val J. Peter, who has served as the executive director of Boys Town USA since 1985. “There is no other way to teach family life than by living in a family. There are no dorms, no mess halls. People ask me ‘what time do the kids get up in the morning?’ I have no idea. It varies from family to family.”

The Boys Town centers around the United States care for an average of 29,000 at-risk boys and girls every year. In addition to the residential facilities, the organizations assists over 377,000 youngsters and their families through the Boys Town National Hotline. The Boys Town programs work under one of the dictums that Father Peter says is so important for the children; “If you want to feel good about yourself, performance precedes self-esteem.”

Family reunification is a goal at Boys Town, as it is at most other residential care facilities. The parents of most of the children are given the time and the opportunity for counseling and other social services, so that they might be able to prove to the government’s child-welfare officials that they are ready meet the responsibilities of raising their children once again. Eventually, some of the parents who do not succeed in that effort have to rescind their rights as legal guardians of their children, thus making the youngsters eligible for adoption by another family. But many child welfare advocates think that this is not happening fast enough.

“Sometimes I think the children of today are a lot worse off than the children of yesteryear, because no matter what we say—that the rights and the children’s best interest comes first—I don’t believe that is the truth in our society,” argues Sister Josephine Murphy, the director of St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home in Hyattsville, Maryland. Her order, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, started St. Ann’s Home in 1860. (Abraham Lincoln himself signed the group’s acts of incorporation in 1863.)

Interests in conflict

Sister Josephine fleshes out her complaint:

The rights and the best interest of the mother come first in our society, at least in the legal system. To me, that is very wrong. Even that law which Congress passed in 1997, the ‘Safe Family and Adoptions Act,’ we’re not complying with that because they have found loopholes in that where the mother still gets first consideration, and it makes me very angry.

They will put them in foster homes with a view to someday returning them home, and you will find children who remain in the system for 5, 10, 15 years, when I feel they should have been released as babies to be adopted and have some permanency in their lives. Children need permanency and they have a right to it.

St. Ann’s takes in the very youngest children in the system, from age 2 days through 8 years. Out of 54 children now residing at St. Ann’s, 39 are age 3 or under. Sister Josephine says that her facility is able to do a number of the things that help these young children prepare for family life—such as preparing them to accept a whole family of siblings. They assess the physical, psychological, and developmental disabilities of the children, so that they will be able to make prompt recommendations for treatment, and they facilitate supervised visits for their little ones with the relatives or foster parents with whom they will be living, helping to ease the transition and prepare the youngsters for the move into their home.

Some of these children have been through traumatic experiences early in life. “We get in a number of children who have witnessed the shooting death of a parent,” Sister Josephine says. “So that has to be all worked through with them. Sometime, they have also seen a baby in the family or another child beaten to death, or these kinds of things.”

The director of St. Ann’s goes on to explain how life at a residential facility helps to heal the emotional wounds of these young children:

Because of the residential environment, children are emotionally free to develop positive relationships with caring adults who are not replacing their parents. The children’s relationship with caregivers is less intense emotionally than with new foster parents. Now we feel that’s a big plus with institutional care because many times, these children have been hurt, or sometimes sexually molested or whatever, under the care of the mother and whoever the father figure is. And so, rather than go into the same situation with people they don’t know, the child comes here where it is a whole different set-up, with many other children their own age, that make them feel comfortable and help them to know that they are going to be okay.

The struggle to survive

The search for funding to support all these programs is a huge problem for today’s residential care facilities. At the Mercy Home, the annual average cost per child is about $63,000. That steep price reflects the extensive therapy these youngsters need in order to put their fractured lives back together, along with the cost of their education and meeting everyday needs such as food and clothing.

The Archdiocese of Chicago does not subsidize the Mercy Home. And the institution is committed to working with private donors rather than depending on government support. “We do not receive—by choice—funding from United Way, and we do not receive government money from the county or the state except in a very few circumstances. . . . I believe that the bulk of all charity in the country should be distributed through private entities: charities, Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, and so forth,” Father Close remarks.

Father Close makes the point that because Mercy Home relies on private donors, the facility does not find itself encumbered by outside interference. He says:

Last year, the total percentage of our revenue coming from the state was 3 percent. The other 97 percent of our income comes from private solicitation. It’s a zero-based budgeting kind of thing. Every year you have to start all over and produce that revenue. But it comes without any strings, from free-will offerings of donors from all over the country to make the work possible.

The freedom that comes from that financial independence is terribly important to these facilities. The “strings” to which Father Close refers can include requirements that violate the principles that are at the heart of a Catholic or Christian residential care facility.

Joe Campo believes that some very real dangers can come along with government support:

If they say that they are going to give us money, then they will say to me, “Make sure that you teach them safe sex, and give them condoms and teach them about planned parenthood.” We don’t do that. We teach them what it is to be a good Catholic Christian man, what it is to go to Mass on Sunday. If they wanted to bring pornography into the house, the government would say, “It’s their First Amendment right,” and I would say, “Well, that isn’t my First Amendment, and that isn’t God’s First Amendment.” We answer to God first. This gives the young people a sense of love and morals.

The spiritual dimension

All of the administrators of residential care facilities who were interviewed for this article emphasized that the spiritual component of their care of the children is vitally important to their healing process. But since so few of the youngsters who come to them for care are Catholic, they are rather general in their religious instruction. They all also noted that the example of Christian morality set for the children by the members of their staff is vital to their operation.

Although the executive director of Boys Town has always been a Catholic priest—starting with the famous founder, Father Edward J. Flanagan—the institution is technically a non-sectarian organization. They still live by one of Father Flanagan’s adages: “Every boy must learn to pray, but how they pray is up to them.”

“We tell all of our kids that you can’t get better without a solid relationship to God,” Father Peter says emphatically. He continues with his thought:

If you are abused, neglected, or abandoned, you are powerless before those feelings—powerless to get out of the hole they put you in. You need to get in touch with the Lord who is there for you to love you and empower you even if there isn’t one person on the face of the earth who cares about you. They need family teachers who say, “I could not possibly live my life without God.”

Boys Town has a very active alumni association and keeps records on its graduates. They are proud of their 82 percent success rate. They define success as staying out of trouble with the law and leading a fulfilling life. Those are noble accomplishments for any citizen, especially someone who had a chaotic childhood.

Unfortunately, not all troubled children receive effective care, and many of them become troubled adults. The failures of government programs for unhappy children can exact a heavy cost on society in later years. By contrast the efforts of the Catholic residential facilities—supported by private donations—can have a powerful impact for the good of American society. Father Close makes this argument:

This country is ignoring the reality that a very significant number of prisoners today are people who have come out of foster care and government controlled delivery of youth services. . . . But you take a place like Boys Town with a national reputation. It’s spending huge amounts of money throughout the country, doing lots of things for kids at all kinds of different levels, and it does it much better than the government.

There is a high level of frustration among the people who work with troubled youngsters, because the problems with the overburdened foster care system are just too expensive—not just in financial terms, but in human terms. In effect, the troubles within the system can sometimes cost a child his life.

As Sister Josephine puts it: “We do something about everything else, and we’ve made such progress with going to the moon and science and medicine, why can’t we do something more for our children?”

Molly Mulqueen is a wife, mother, and free-lance writer based in Colorado.

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