By Msgr. Noel Burtenshaw

NEW YORK--The smash hit musical currently running on Broadway is 42nd Street. It is a revival of the toe-tapping, colorful, songful extravaganza from the thirties.

To get to Father Bruce Ritter’s Covenant House for runaways from midtown Manhattan you have to travel by 42nd Street. It is still an infamous thoroughfare. It is a flashy den of porno shops, peep shows and storefronts promising all kinds of immoral pastimes barely within the law. The establishments never close. The neons never dim. The trade, in human beings, is ever brisk.

It was the carnage of this merciless, child-destroying avenue that brought Franciscan priest Bruce Ritter to this neighborhood. I paid him a visit recently.

I was within about 50 yards of Covenant House when the young man approached me. My coat was pulled tightly around my neck as the wind blew. “Hey,” he said, “I want to talk to you.” Looking sideways at his young, pockmarked face, I kept walking. “Let me ask you a question, okay?” I nodded okay, but kept walking towards the door. “Tell me this,” said the kid, maybe 15 or 16 years old. “Are you straight or bi?”

I had no answer. My hand was on the door handle of Covenant House. I was in and he was gone, melting back onto 8th Avenue and 42nd Street.

Later in the interview, I told Father Ritter about the incident. he became most intense. “What did you reply to him?” he asked. I told him I had said nothing, but then asked what he would have done in the same circumstance. “I would have taken him by the hand and told him I cared for him, or maybe I would have told him I cared for him, or maybe I would have told him I was not into sex, but I would be happy to buy him a meal.”

Looking across the desk at this modern savior of young children, you know he would have done just that. And he has been doing it for years. In 1981, he took 7,000 such children off the battleground of 42nd Street where they were dying. He gave them a second chance. In his own estimation, Ritter and his Covenant House apostolate were instrumental in saving one third. The rest went back to the streets. “Most die young,” said Father Ritter, obviously tired of repeating the statistics. “They are found in the river, in the streets or dead from alcoholism.”

What is Covenant House in New York City? That’s a simple question for Bruce Ritter and has a simple bitter answer. “We are running an intensive care unit for dying children. As in all intensive care hospital wards, most of the patients do not recover. My kids don’t all recover either.”

When Father Bruce speaks about the under 21-year-old guests of his House, he always calls them “my kids.” That’s what they are--his. No one else wants them. They have run away from home, either looking for the carnival life television-land promised them or because they have been abused.

“Or worse,” says Ritter, “they are throwaways, pushed from homes where all care has ceased. They go to the streets and begin their quick journey of death.”

There is good money in prostitution. Kiddie porn is in high demand. To eat, to live, to have some hope, they grab the easy dollar. “But it’s not that easy,” says Father Bruce, who opens his door and his home to dozens of frightened sex offenders each day. “It’s hard to be a whore, it sickens their stomach to have to do it, they hate like hell putting themselves on the meat rack of prostitution. They just have to live.”

Does this modern Don Bosco see any cure for the ills of these children? “Cure?” Bruce Ritter raises himself up in the chair. “Cure? The sex industry is a protected industry in this city. It is so profitable, the mobs are running it. The authorities have given it up. Three members of the U.S. Congress bought children last year. They were caught and still one was re-elected by the people.”

And he goes on intensely. “Do you know what the most watched television shows in this nation are? Dallas and General Hospital. And they are about adultery and fornication and cheating and drug abuse. We are being entertained by this rot and we watch it like addicts. So why would we worry about 10-year-old prostitutes? We have pregnant girls on the second floor of this House that are not finished being children yet. The answer is care--and as of now we just don’t. We don’t care.”

It was 13 years ago that Father Bruce Ritter, with his earned Ph.D. teaching in swanky Manhattan College, was challenged to care. “I was really giving hot sermons,” says the Franciscan. “Yes, I was hot stuff. But my students called my bluff. Let’s see you practice what you preach, Father.”

He went to 42nd Street and saw the raw destruction. He organized volunteers to save the victims. The government rented him a rundown motel for a dollar a year. He turned it into a sanctuary of unharrassed rest for frightened dying children. They are the great armies of the forgotten. Bruce Ritter calls them simply “my kids.”

He and his followers who love to serve will see 10,000 new faces next year. All will be welcomed. “No one can be turned away. All are helped and sheltered. Most have desperate health problems especially venereal disease. They come to us armed--knives and guns--we take them away and they never get them back. We nurse them back to health and encourage them to find their feet, to find jobs. They leave, but they can come back. Always they can come back here. That’s a rule--they can come back.”

When they return, sometimes frightened, sometimes wounded, they find the steady, loving priest waiting for them. “I love this work that I found. I was like a large section of our Church--I was preaching to the saved. Don’t get me wrong, it is good work--but it is preaching to the saved or to the grateful poor. The ugly, poor, selling themselves to live, we care very little about. But when we turn and care for them, they respond. My kids prove what I say--they respond.”

There is another side to Father Bruce Ritter--a side that he tolerates. It takes hard-earned cash to house, clothe and bind the wounds of those martyrs of 42nd Street. So he is constantly on tour and on his feet begging for the apostolate. “Tell them I will get a million dollars from governmental agencies next year, but I need 10 million to keep the doors open. I have to spend a lot of my time giving that message. It has to be done.”

Father Ritter is extending this apostolate to Canada and also to Guatemala. That has to be done too. But his favorite journey is the one he frequently takes across 8th Avenue and up 42nd Street. The battleground is always active. Disregarded lives litter the pavements aplenty. Father Bruce Ritter is needed in these parts.

This priest knows it.