http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._ghetto_priest
Jamaica Honors N.Y.-Born 'Ghetto Priest'
Wed May 19, 2:12 AM ET
By STEVENSON JACOBS
KINGSTON, Jamaica - They call him the "ghetto priest," a New York-bred, straight-talking clergyman who has worked for nearly three decades to bring hope to the hopeless in Jamaica's grittiest shantytowns.
AP Photo
Starting with a soup kitchen in the 1970s, Monsignor Richard Albert has quietly but aggressively forged Jamaica's largest social outreach network through his privately funded St. Patrick's and Stella Maris Foundations. His 15 centers help thousands each week, offering everything from computer training to medical treatment for AIDS (news - web sites) and leprosy.
Among his most successful programs are courses that teach people to run catering businesses from their homes and build and sell wooden furniture.
"The poor don't need charity. What they need is empowerment," Albert told The Associated Press over the weekend from the verandah of his old farm house in Sligoville, a rural town about 30 miles from Kingston that overlooks rolling green hills.
Albert, 58, will receive the first $1 million Opus Prize during a ceremony Friday in San Francisco. The foundation awards people for faith-based social entrepreneurial work and is part of the Opus Group, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based real estate firm that has developed office and industrial parks across the United States. The prize money comes from the Opus Group.
"We wanted someone who transforms the lives of people, someone like Monsignor Albert," said Don Neureuther, executive director of the Opus Prize Foundation, based in Naples, Fla. The award will be presented by Archbishop William Leveda from the San Francisco diocese.
Albert said money from the prize, billed as the largest of its kind, will be evenly distributed to his programs in Jamaica.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Albert joined the seminary at age 18. In the 1970s, he was set to become ordained and take a campus priesthood in Norman, Okla., but flunked his seminary exam at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
When Albert finally passed the exam, his superior asked him if he wanted to go to Jamaica.
"I thought he meant Jamaica, New York," Albert recalled with a chuckle. "He said, 'No, no, you dummy, I mean Jamaica — in the West Indies!'"
When he arrived on the Caribbean island in 1979, Albert was shocked by the grinding poverty of Kingston's slums.
Living in the rough Waterhouse neighborhood outside of Kingston, he saw nightly clashes between gunmen loyal to Jamaica's two main political parties in the bloody run-up to the 1980 general elections. Some 800 people were killed.
"I went to bed most nights with the sound of gunfire and killing," Albert said, a red macaw on his shoulder and his English Bulldog snoring at his feet.
Frustrated by the violence, he began mediating disputes in the community, eventually persuading several known gang members to surrender on murder charges.
He also served another vital role — using his pickup truck to ferry pregnant women to the hospital. He recalled one night a man banged on his door, desperate to get help for his wife, minutes away from giving birth.
"I got in my truck and picked them up and ... on the side of the road there was another lady just laying there ready to have her baby. So we picked her up too," he said.
But it was the lack of education in the shantytowns that troubled Albert most.
In the inner-city community of Riverton, home to the Kingston city dump, children once struggled to find places to study and use computers. Now, young and old alike have access to an air-conditioned computer lab provided by Albert's foundations.
"Before, people were ashamed to be from Riverton, but now there's a sense of pride," said Junior Rowe, manager of the center.
Despite all the praise, Albert says he is no Mother Teresa.
"I would never purport to be a saint," said Albert, who prefers polo shirts and sandals over the collar, and confesses an affinity for Dominican cigars and an occasional glass of whiskey.
He counts among his fondest experiences a 1995 visit by Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II, pictures of whom adorn the walls of Albert's home.
These days Albert is focusing on increasing church attendance and furthering the work of his centers. He says he has no plans to leave his adopted homeland.
"Whatever time the good Lord gives me I'll keep doing what I'm doing and loving it," said Albert, who became a Jamaican citizen in 2001.
On the Web:
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Opus Corp.
http://www.opuscorp.com
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I figured with all the nasty things going on in the news, a little something nice might be welcomed. Also, for once, its great to see a story involving a Catholic priest without the term "sex offender".
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