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Nun, 77, retires from program of outreach to elderly
Monday, January 03, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As the world said goodbye to the 20th century, a smaller, more personal farewell marked the end of an era of charity and a new beginning for one Stanton Heights woman.
On Friday, 77-year-old Sister Michele van Voorst, a Catholic nun affiliated with the Sisters of Bethany order, retired from her position as founding director of the Elderly and Meals on Wheels Program, a project of the ecumenical East End Cooperative Ministry.
The ministry is an interfaith relief organization comprising 51 citywide churches and synagogues and headquartered at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in East Liberty.
Van Voorst was recruited in 1972 to expand an existing food distribution program. Under her management, the Elderly and Meals on Wheels Program has become an important Pittsburgh relief organization which, according to ministry figures, cared for nearly 500 homebound people and delivered 31,376 meals in the 1998-99 fiscal year.
Van Voorst was born in The Hague, Netherlands, and survived the World War II occupation by Germany, which held her father as a prisoner of war. After the conflagration, she joined the Ladies of Bethany, an order founded by a Jesuit priest, and for 11 years, she worked with teens and young adults in Vienna.
"It wasn't the war that called me [to the order]," said van Voorst. "What attracted me to the Ladies of Bethany was this ecumenical mission, reaching out to people who don't believe in God or who have had their faith shaken, but also to work for Christian unity."
In 1962 while on a fund-raising mission to Boston, van Voorst met then-Bishop John J. Wright of Pittsburgh, who asked the Ladies of Bethany to minister to tenants of a Northview Heights housing project called The Vineyard.
"He said he was inspired by our charisma," she said. "We are not a teaching or nursing order. We were founded to be in the midst of the world and to be where the people are. We did not want to be only for the Catholics there, but to be for the community of Northview Heights."
In 1972, the East End Cooperative Ministry offered van Voorst directorship of its expanding program.
"They were looking for someone to work with the elderly people, and it was up to me where we would go with that. There was already a Meals on Wheels program functioning. I opted to focus on the homebound elderly people and to expand the meal deliveries."
At the time, the Pittsburgh area had few outreach programs for shut-ins. Van Voorst began by personally visiting about 20 homes per week, bringing food and supplies and offering opportunities for conversation and spiritual guidance. With the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh initially paying her salary, she solicited contributions from places of worship and landed a one-year pilot program grant from the Pennsylvania Area Agency on Aging. The agency paid for a station wagon to move the homebound to and from hospitals.
"In 1975, there was a lot of emphasis in the state and county on senior center programs and preventive care so the elderly would not get sick," she said. "After that, we grew on our own and didn't apply for [public money] anymore."
The well-developed program she's leaving after 27 years at the helm is financed through interfaith church and synagogue contributions, private foundations and personal donations. Its $100,000 yearly budget pays the salaries of the director, a cook, a social worker and assistant. Homebound elderly and handicapped people pay for food delivered through the Meals on Wheels program.
"I find that people have different needs depending on how old they are," said van Voorst. "You cannot just generalize it, but I sometimes think the difference is in their attitude, their faith, their church belief. For the very old, it's very easy to pray with them because that's what they like, and to talk about the end of life. Even if they don't go to church anymore, their faith is very deep and very real."
Many shut-ins who are just over the retirement age, she said, didn't live their lives with deep religious convictions.
"I think the younger old people can be more demanding of services and less interested in the spiritual," said van Voorst. "With them I have to remind them of it, show that it helps their quality of life and help them to express it."
In the wake of her retirement, the organization plans to continue the program while it searches for a new director.
"What's hard is to find someone with her charisma," said Michele Griffiths, a coordinator with East End Community Ministries. "A lot of people can manage, but what we need is someone with Sister Michele's personality and compassion. I don't think we'll ever really be able to replace her."
Van Voorst says she has no firm retirement plans, other than to "find a new challenge and to look with new eyes at a different ministry."
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