Ninety-Six Years of Service: 1910-2006
Ninety-six years ago, in a relatively short span of time thousands of Catholic immigrants came to our region from various parts of Europe. Penniless, men took jobs in steel mills. Women worked in factories or as domestics. It was a life of long hours and poor pay. Mill accidents were regular occurrences that resulted in debilitating injuries and deaths. Often, accidents left families with no “breadwinner.” Widows, orphans, and elderly were forced by circumstance to make it on their own.
Family life was often neglected, and court records tell of children and youth “in trouble” with law. The Pittsburgh Survey of 1909-1914 details the dire poverty, filth, unsanitary housing, and hunger that existed. This region’s history tells us that things got worse before they got better. The stouthearted immigrant workers would experience bread lines, strikes, and violence on the streets before improved wages came their way. Generations would know World War I, a devastating influenza outbreak, continuing unemployment, a Great Depression, and World War II before a “renaissance” came to be.
Through it all, Catholic Charities struggled valiantly to obtain the resources that would sustain programs and services to support the men, women, and children most in need.
Today, Catholic Charities continues to respond to human need.
Serving more than 90,000 individuals in 2006, Catholic Charities provides community programs, counseling programs, emergency relief, housing and tangible assistance, mother and infant programs, elderly and parish services throughout six counties of southwestern Pennsylvania: Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Greene, Lawrence and Washington.
Catholic Charities provides programs that preserve life and sustain families; it shelters and trains mothers of infants, counsels parents, and supports adopting parents.
As in the past, Catholic Charities continues to aid refugee families, who today come here from war-torn areas around the world. It assists refugees with jobs, housing, and language training.
And as this nation’s WWII “baby boomers” become the largest-ever population of “seniors,” Catholic Charities is creating new and unique programs to ensure that every stage of life offers individuals a quality existence.