By Msgr. Noel C. Burtenshaw

On a hot--very hot--summer day in 1979, Betti Knott was sitting in her office in Peachtree Center nursing a deepening resentment. She saw a lot of bureaucrats around her furiously working at doing very little. “It was one of those days,” says Betti, “when I realized my life needed more than the challenge of this government job.”

Betti decided to take a walk. On the first corner, in the blazing heat, she spied a vagabond lady adorned in many dresses (at least five) along with a raincoat desperately digging in a mound of garbage cans. Betti moved on.

At the next corner, just off the glitter of Peachtree, she passed a wino with his bottle huddling on the sun-baked concrete. Again she moved on. One block away a group of panhandlers counted the morning’s take and set strategy for the afternoon.

“I returned to the office knowing I needed a new vocation. I called a friend and told him how I felt. Naturally he said, “Well what do you want to do?” I almost yelled, I want to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick. He advised me to think it over.”

Betti didn’t have to. “Three weeks later the same friend called and said ‘Do you know that Joe Flagan has resigned as head of the St. Vincent de Paul Society? Here’s your chance, I just sent them your resume.”

The government was about to lose Betti Knott.

This bright, cheery 32-year-old native of Key West, Fla., exchanged her posh office for one on a side street behind St. Anthony’s school in West End. “We have a little building there,” says Betti. “It is sort of hidden away but the poor know where we are.”

They most certainly do. As head of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Betti is one of the poor’s best friends. And she loves the title. It’s just a problem there is so little to go round.

“But we try. We get 120 calls per week besides all those we already know of. They need everything--money, food, somewhere to stay. We are on the move for them and we have the most beautiful volunteers working for us. They are a blessing, a real active blessing.”

Betti is talking about the lay parish Vincentians: Men and women working the footsteps of their founder, Frederic Ozanam, who began this lay outreach to the poor of Paris in the last century. He placed this work for the poor under the patronage of St. Vincent de Paul. In the North Georgia area Betti Knott can count 300 Vincentians. They are on call for all kinds of cases.

Betti outlines some of her cases with the ease of one who is familiar with desperate need. “Take the little old lady in northwest Atlanta living in a little house near the waterworks. Her pension is $160 per month. Her house note is $90. Then she pays utility bills. She has nothing for food and would starve except for the little she gets in food stamps. She comes to us frequently.”

“Or take the young woman living on welfare. Her husband walked out when she had her second child. When you include food stamps she has less than $200 per month. Her rent is $125, then she pays utilities. She’s on a waiting list, with 4,500 others, to get into public housing. She cannot work with her new baby. She must have food, diapers, clothes--and no where to turn. She turns to us.”

The list of cases, one more heart rending than another, goes on. Betti Knott and her Vincentians are just one of three charitable groups in the Atlanta area that will give financial aid. “The Christian Council and the Salvation Army give too. There’s never enough to go around.”

Betti estimates that the Vincent de Paul Society, parish conferences and her central offices, distribute $200,000 each year in charitable donations. “This Society is one of the most beautiful reasons for being Catholic,” says Betti. “We don’t just belong to a Church. We are a great big universal brotherhood and sisterhood reaching out with our strength to give hope to the hopeless. It is beautiful.”

And there are other thriving arms of help coming from the men and women of St. Vincent. “We have two clothing stores,” says Betti Knott. “One is on Clairmont where a lot of poor people live and have great need. I mean a lot of poor white people. And they trade at that store. The other is on McClendon in downtown Atlanta. That one is an oasis of help as you can well imagine.”

But they also have a food warehouse, they participate in the food bank, they take cases from other agencies, they’ll get a wheelchair for a girl who cannot walk and cannot be carried anymore, they’ll show the poor how to get government help. The St. Vincent de Paul people are there on the job. They are the ever-working, action arm of each Catholic. They carry the message of mercy to the poor of any denomination.

There is a collection for the work of those unsung heroes of St. Vincent de Paul in all our parishes on Oct. 3 and 4. Betti Knott has high hopes, and prayers, for a successful, plentiful result to that collection. But there’s something she wants even more than overflowing coffers. “I want a conference of St. Vincent de Paul in every parish. We now have 25 out of a possible 65. Some of them are super, the one up in St. Mark’s in Clarkesville in the mountains is terrific and they reach out beautifully to the poor. Well, what I want is one like that in every parish.”

We hope this optimistic leader of renewed Catholic action gets her wish. In the meantime, on the weekend that is ahead, let us give to the poor person of Christ by giving to the hungry, naked and sick that each day pass through the life of Betti Knott.

Let’s all do it.