Maurice Chase, priest and patron saint of L.A.’s skid row, dies at 92

[rug]

By Elaine Woo, Thursday, November 24, 4:59 PM

Nearly every Sunday morning, Thanksgiving and Christmas for almost three decades, the man called Father Dollar Bill, Father Dollar or just D.B. — for Dollar Bill — showed up on a Los Angeles skid row sidewalk. He was a white-haired man in a red sweater and a Notre Dame cap, his pockets jammed with crisp, green bills, which he handed out until the money was gone.

Father Maurice Chase didn’t mind what name the destitute men, penniless mothers, people in wheelchairs, drug addicts and ex-cons called him. He didn’t care how they planned to spend the money. Nor was he bothered by the criticism that other skid row service providers sometimes voiced: that he was a self-promoting attention hound whose hit-and-run assistance had little, if any, enduring effects on the desperate people who gathered for his handouts, blessings and hugs.

“I’m out here to tell people I love them and God loves them,” he told the Los Angeles Times several years ago. “I met Mother Teresa in Mexico City once, and she told me to touch the poor. Do you hear that? Touch the poor.”

Father Chase died Nov. 20, four days before Thanksgiving, at his Los Angeles home. He was 92 and had cancer, said his nephew Robert Boyd.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/maurice-chase-priest-and-patron-saint-of-las-skid-row-dies-at-92/2011/11/24/gIQAqzTDtN_story.html

[Mnemosyne]

1. “We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love.”

 “If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one.”

"Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”

Father Chase, you made the world a brighter place. Rest in peace. You did well...