Chris Delany’s revolution of mercy

A collage hangs on the wall next to Chris Delany’s desk in the Sacramento Loaves & Fishes Welcome Center. It evokes the classic “American Gothic” painting—man with pitchfork, woman, farmhouse in the background—but with a few differences.

Instead of surly Midwestern farmers, it’s a decade-old photo of Chris and her late husband Dan. She’s sporting sunglasses and a half-smile. He’s wearing overalls under a black sweater and a pin that reads “Housing Now!” Smiling cut-outs of homeless guests, volunteers and staffers peek out from the background. Instead of a pitchfork, Dan holds a protest sign.

“OUR GOV’T LIES,” it reads.

It’s not the message you’d expect to see in the welcoming center of Sacramento’s largest provider to the homeless community, but one in line for a couple who built its legacy serving the region’s most vulnerable.

Chris is an 83-year-old anarchist. She’s radical, a purist. Her principles honed and unyielding.

Over the years, she’s been arrested a dozen times protesting the nuclear arms race. She’s served AIDS patients, prisoners and the mentally ill. Teamed with Dan, this couple has been responsible for some 7 million meals served to the region’s homeless over the span of three decades.

Dan died last October following a long battle with dementia. He’d been with Chris for 48 years, married for 47 and had two children, John and Rebecca.

The Delanys founded Loaves & Fishes—Sacramento’s now-massive nonprofit serving the many needs of the region’s legions of homeless men, women and children—in 1983. For three decades, they were the standard-bearers for a population the government could not or would not help. Dan was the visionary, the one who cooked up lofty ideas and spoke eloquently and loudly for the homeless. Chris was both the engine and soul of the organization, making the impossible happen daily while setting an example on what it means to take homeless guests in without judgment.

Humble, caring and joyful, Chris is still the heart of Loaves & Fishes. She’s white-haired, with a sharp wit and a grandmother’s smile. She spends her mornings in the Visitor Center hugging homeless guests, answering calls from desperate folks looking for a place to go and writing thank-you notes to donors.

“She’s right in the center in this army of workers,” says Gerrie Baskerville, co-director of Loaves’ Jail Visitation program.

Baskerville first met the Delanys in 1980 at their memorial for the activist Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement that inspired many—the Delanys included—to dedicate their lives to service and activism.

But before all of this, Chris was a nun. Dan was a priest. And when they met that fateful 1967 summer in southern California, their lives changed forever.

“Dan used to say, ’There is no path. The walker makes the path,’” Delany says.

And the one she’s blazed is remarkable.

God, love and anarchy

From her Los Angeles upbringing to the decades serving California’s homeless, Delany has lived a life of inspiration. She was the ultimate complement to her fiery husband Dan, and vice versa. Together, the couple forged a life that knew no bounds. They founded Catholic Worker houses in two cities, aided hundreds of thousands of Californians in need, raised two children and sparked a revolution of mercy that continues to blossom in Sacramento today.

Delany likes to tell this story of an angry guy who called Loaves a while back because the nonprofit was requesting donations of shrimp for a holiday meal. He didn’t think the homeless deserved shrimp.

“I was so pissed. I said, ’Well, they do,’” she says.

“He said, ’Well, I was needy and I got out of poverty.’

“And I said, ’You know, some people do a really good job and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. But some people don’t even have boots. You’re lucky you had boots.’”

To understand how Delany came to view the world in this light, it helps to know her story.

The daughter of Sicilian immigrants, Delany arrived in the world on top of a kitchen table in East Los Angeles in 1933, in the heart of the Great Depression. Her father, Salvatore Pacino, worked in a factory. Her mother Caroline was a seamstress who’d grown up in Pueblo, Colo., where her grandfather had worked as a coal miner. He died of black lung when Delany was about 3.

Delany grew up in an Italian neighborhood surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. She was the middle child, very fond of her older brother John, who died in World War II’s Operation Tiger exercise when he was just 19.

Her parents worked hard so she could get the education they never had. Early on, she was sure she’d determined her calling.

“I always wanted to be a nun since I was in first grade,” she says. “Nuns taught me and I just felt a call to it.”

After graduating from Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood, Delany joined the ranks of the school’s nuns. She taught there for 16 years.

“Then she met my dad, who had these radical plans,” says Delany’s daughter, Rebecca MacLaren.

There’s a passage in the Bible, Matthew 25, when Jesus makes the big reveal of how folks are going be judged when they die. You know, “I was tired and you fed me,” “I was naked and you clothed me.” That whole thing.

Delany remembers a moment near the end of her tenure as a nun, reading this passage and really taking it in for the first time.

“I thought, ’Oh, my God! That’s how we’re gonna get to heaven or not!’” she says. Her next thought: How the hell am I going to do that at this school?

“Soon after that, I met Dan,” she says. “Is that a miracle?”

Dan first saw his future wife at a dinner party in the summer of 1967. She was 34, he was two years younger. Dan had been a priest for just one year. He was an idealist, bright-eyed and brimming with energy. Delany had been spending the summer in Santa Barbara on a tertianship—a kind of spiritual retreat for Christians. She was back in Los Angeles for the weekend to prep for the school year.

MacLaren remembers her father talking about meeting her mother for the first time. “I saw your mom and that was it,” he said.

Delany remembers it this way:

“I was smitten with him immediately, only neither of us showed our ’smittenness,’” she says. “It was instant, I guess, for both of us.”

The two stayed up talking that evening with a mutual friend, another nun, until 11 p.m. And when Delany returned to finish her tertianship, Dan came out to Santa Barbara for a retreat of his own.

He visited her regularly that summer, the two talking for hours on the beach. By October they were hopelessly in love. With a leap of faith, the nun and the priest left their positions in the church.

“That’s when it got interesting,” Delany says.

Dan had this great spirit for social justice. He was deeply inspired by the Catholic Worker Movement, a collection of anarchistic Catholic communities founded by activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. MacLaren says the Catholic Worker Movement was controversial, even to Catholics.

“It didn’t care about winning huge amounts of influence,” she says. “Its focus was on acts, work.”

They dedicated themselves to addressing the immediate needs of people who had little or nothing, serving them and then challenging the societal structures that created such poverty and pain in the first place.

“Just kind of calling bullshit on that stuff,” MacLaren says.

The Delanys opened the Los Angeles Catholic Worker house in 1970. The change from working with students and textbooks to serving the poor was not easy—particularly for a woman who’d been half-expecting a picket-fence lifestyle with her new husband.

“I had a hard time getting into having homeless people around, mentally ill people,” she says. “I was used to nuns.”

During this time, the couple and their Catholic Worker friends fed the homeless community on Skid Row every day. They opened up the first floor of the Catholic Worker house at night to those who needed a place to sleep.

Over time, Dan had tensions with other leaders at the house. Eventually, the couple decided to move on. The Delanys drifted for some time after.

They passed a year picking cherry tomatoes and advocating farmworkers’ rights in Fresno, a city Delany calls “God’s Left Armpit.” (Bakersfield is the right one.)

They then lived in the East Bay, looking for work and living on food stamps. “[That] was another very interesting experience for me,” Delany says. “Do we buy toilet paper or soap today? It’s very challenging.”

Around 1978, a friend visited the Delanys. She told them there was no Catholic Worker Movement in Sacramento, that they should move out there and start one. So they did.

The couple bought an old home on 12th Street between F and G streets. Today, it’s home to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, but back then it was a dilapidated mess. They enlisted volunteers to clean the place up, furnished the house and opened Sacramento’s Catholic Worker house, serving poor families who wanted to visit loved ones in prison.

Here’s how it worked: Inmates in Folsom Prison could only receive visitors on Saturdays. Many of their loved ones would spend all their money on travel to Sacramento for the visitations and couldn’t pay for hotels or food. Chris and Dan Delany made up for the difference, giving 35-40 family members free lodging through the weekend and driving them up to the prison in their Volkswagen van. Delany would feed them all.

“When we had done that for several years we thought it would be a good thing to start a soup kitchen, like most Catholic Workers,” Delany says.

They had no idea what that would grow to become.

A lighthouse of strength

Spend some time with Delany, and you’ll start to wonder if she understands her impact on the world. Ask about leadership, and she’ll laugh.

“That’s funny,” she says. “I’ve never thought of myself as a leader.”

“I would totally disagree,” MacLaren says.

Many in Sacramento remember Dan Delany’s leadership. He was larger than life, a bearded visionary, a man unafraid to go to battle in his mission to serve the homeless.

Chris Delany’s style has always been a bit different. When MacLaren thinks of her mother and her life’s work, she’s reminded of that old lighthouse metaphor. Some people are like lighthouses, the saying goes, in that a lighthouse doesn’t go out saving people, it serves its purpose simply by standing strong and casting its light, a pillar of spiritual fortitude and emotional guidance.

“My mom is the lighthouse and my dad was search-and-rescue,” she says.

In 1983, Chris and Dan did something radical: They bought an old tavern on North 12th Street and turned it into a dining room for the city’s growing homeless population.

They named it Loaves & Fishes after the famous biblical story in which Jesus performs a miracle by feeding the multitudes with just a handful of food.

“When Loaves & Fishes opened its doors on August 8th, we served about 70 people in all,” Dan wrote in that year’s Thanksgiving newsletter. “The number of the hungry who come to us has grown to the point that on Oct. 31st we served about 375 meals, with the usual daily number during October running between 250 and 350 meals.”

It was obvious the Delanys and their volunteers had tapped into a great need. The ’80s were a difficult era for the country’s poor. At the time, president Ronald Reagan defunded mental health services on a national level in the way his home state of California did in the decades before. He also cut funding in social safety net services.

“A lot of people did go through this safety net,” Delany says. “We began to see growing numbers of men and women, with children.”

As the homeless population grew over the years, so did the call to feed them. On September 29, 1992, Loaves & Fishes served its 1-millionth meal. October 28, 1999, marked its 3-millionth. Last year, one month before Dan’s passing, Loaves served its 7-millionth meal on September 17.

“Because the rise of homelessness in Sacramento at that time, we had to develop more and more services to try and cope and help them survive,” says Leroy Chatfield, who served as Loaves & Fishes’ first executive director from 1987 to 2000. “It was a major growth spurt, let me tell you.”

In response to the rise in female guests, they created Maryhouse in 1986, a day shelter for women and children. Seeing the need for children at Maryhouse to continue their educations, they created the Mustard Seed School two years later. They opened up Brother Martin’s Courtyard in 1988, an outdoor space with a fountain where guests could drink coffee and enjoy donated day-old pastries while waiting for the kitchen to begin serving. To sustain the growing homeless population, Loaves built a larger dining room on North C Street, and an expanded waiting area called Friendship Park in 1991.

They opened Mercy Clinic for the sick. Genesis for the mentally ill. Jail Visitation and the Legal Clinic for those in trouble with the law. A shower house, a library, animal kennels.

“Every time we saw a need, we put another program in,” says Baskerville, who has worked at Loaves since its inception. “And too bad, because we’d rather have it decrease than increase.”

But as the years pass, the need simply grows. How do they pay for it all?

“It’s called the Bank of Faith,” Chris says. Loaves & Fishes refuses all government funding (anarchists, remember?), but their contributions from community and religious organizations are profound. According to tax documents, Loaves received $6.3 million in donations and grants in 2015, and just under $1.5 million in noncash contributions.

“We live on the small amounts that people give us every month,” Baskerville says. “We don’t have any orange juice for breakfast? Somebody brings in a case of orange juice.”

Same goes for baby carriages, school supplies, food and volunteers. Loaves & Fishes offers 12 programs to homeless guests, and partners with a dozen or so more homeless service providers. They staff 80 employees—about 30 percent of whom have been homeless—and saw almost 3,000 volunteers pass through last year. Their impact on the homeless population seeking emergency help is undeniable. In 2015, the dining room served 16,016 guests more than 171,773 meals, the wash house saw 29,178 hot showers and shaves, and Maryhouse provided daytime shelter services to 2,012 women, 23 single fathers and 1,310 children.

All this thanks to a couple of Catholic anarchists in a soup kitchen some 33 years ago. There’s a parable in the Bible that uses the mustard seed as a metaphor for the potential of great things coming from small beginnings.

“That’s what I think Dan and I did,” Chris says. “We planted this seed, and then people came with everybody’s work, volunteering and donating and everything. It’s now a huge tree.”

‘You do what you can'

Delany shuffles down the path from her home to the Jesuit Volunteer’s house next door. Wearing a summery floral purple-and-white shirt, she transports her Key lime pie with care. It’s a Tuesday in early July. Tonight she’ll eat dinner with the young volunteers, as she does on occasion with each year’s group. She stops at the end of the path, at the entrance to a garden. Dan’s garden. He used to to work out there for hours. He loved it so much that he’d asked for his cremains to be spread out among these plants.

She surveys the lawn, still, frozen in memory, before taking a breath and moving on. It’s impossible to spend time with Delany without feeling her profound sense of loss, of grief.

“Those of us who knew them know that Dan couldn’t have done what he did without Chris,” says Cara Taylor, who ran Hope House—the region’s first safe living space for people suffering from the AIDS virus—in its earliest years. As the Delanys focused their efforts on serving Sacramento’s homeless in the ’80s their Catholic Worker prisoner initiative tapered off, leaving the house on 12th and F out of use.

But while on a retreat with a local priest, Chris learned of the priest’s efforts to serve Sacramentans suffering with AIDS. He mentioned that most landlords would not rent to people suffering from this mysterious illness, leaving many homeless.

“So I said to Dan, ’Hey, that sounds like something we really should get into,’” Delany says.

“That’s a great example of how they challenged a community’s thinking at the time,” says MacLaren of her parents. Think about it: It’s 1987. The AIDS epidemic has just taken hold. It is a deadly, nebulous illness. Folks are unsure how it is contracted, but everyone knows that, at this time, a diagnosis means death. Beyond that, the disease is predominantly affecting gay men, a population already suffering from deep discrimination.

“Homelessness and poverty is one thing, but this really uncharted, unknown territory I think speaks volumes to the idea that they were no-bullshit when it comes to serving a vulnerable population,” MacLaren says.

It was good to help them, Delany says, but she’ll never forget the sound of the van driving up the alley to carry off residents who had died.

“That was very sobering,” she says. How does one do it? How does she keep fighting when the pain of the terminally ill, the homeless, the poor seems to never end?

“You do what you can,” Delany tells the young volunteers at dinner, “and you do the best you can. If you’re tired, take a break.”

Even today, 33 years since starting the nonprofit with her husband, Delany does what she can. Call Loaves & Fishes any given morning and she’s the one to answer the phone. Walk into the welcome center and she’ll greet you with her trademark cheer and humility.

“All of these people have been touched by Chris’ example, and by Loaves & Fishes, and have had opportunities to incorporate that gift in seeing other people as real people in all that they do,” says Joan Burke, director of advocacy at Loaves & Fishes.

“You feel like you’re in the middle of a miracle,” says Karen Banker of the nonprofit. “She’s been the center to all of this for years.” Seven million meals. Hundreds of thousands of mouths fed. Tens of thousands of volunteers, donors and staff. It’s impossible to gauge this Catholic Worker duo’s impact on the Sacramento community.

“It’s this widening circle,” Burke says. And it keeps growing.

One of the Jesuit Volunteers recalls a recent conversation she had with Delany on her porch.

“When is fig season over?” the volunteer asked.

“When the figs stop falling off the trees,” Delany said.

It’s a Zen answer, but then Chris is quite Zen for a Catholic. You almost have to be when dedicating your life to a problem that just seems to grow as the years pass. See a need. Serve the need. Repeat.

To Delany, the answer to our homelessness problem is a change of perspective.

“I think the biggest need is to see them as human beings,” she says. “And to make an effort to see that they have a place to live and get off the streets.”

For her part, she’ll serve as long as she’s able.

“You do the work that you’re called to do, and God will do the rest.”