By Rita McInerney

A commitment to work for the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Australia will take Betti Knott from Atlanta to Melbourne in late June of this year.

Mrs. Knott, executive director of the Atlanta archdiocesan council of SVDP, will be consultant for the council of the state of Victoria which includes the Melbourne archdiocese and the dioceses of Ballarat, Sandhurst and Sale.

The offer to work with the Victoria council was made to her a year ago by Jim Carroll, council president at the time. She had met him at a SVDP meeting in Montreal. He later came to Atlanta and she visited Melbourne for two weeks last summer.

“I have a lot to learn from those people. That’s why I’m going there,” Mrs. Knott said. She views it as a “work exchange. I’m going to provide them with my expertise and knowledge.” And she is eager to find out how the council in Victoria rallies volunteers and learn about their youth programs.

The distance – 12,000 miles – from home and family, leaving friends, her fondness for Atlanta, made it hard for her to come to a decision. After many months, she said, she decided that taking the opportunity to work in Australia was what God wanted her to do at this time in her life.

Nevertheless, “the thought of leaving is so painful. This job has been my life for eight years,” she observed, adding, “I have some apprehension, of course. Anyone does who goes to live in a foreign country…They wanted me there for three years but I couldn’t commit myself to that.” She expects the assignment to last two years.

Mrs. Knott joined the Atlanta SVDP council as executive secretary in late 1979. Last year her job title was changed to executive director “to more appropriately reflect the management activities” of the position, according to Jim Needham of St. Ann’s in Marietta, president of the council.

Complementing her dedication to the ideals of the society, founded in Paris by Frederick Ozanam in 1833, her volunteer commitment to Atlanta’s night shelters, the day care shelter at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the lunchtime meal program at St. Anthony’s were well beyond what the board would have expected of its director and greatly mitigated the problems of the people SVDP serves, Needham said.

Recognition of her role in the area’s shelter ministry came in March, 1983, when the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta gave her an award for “exceptional personal ministry” for her work in coordinating volunteers for the night shelter at Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Atlanta.

When the program began in the winter of 1980-81, she took on the task of finding volunteers to staff and make sandwiches for the homeless men who came to the shelter.

“Because of her remarkable ability to get people involved in nuts and bolts ministry, a kind of practical workable ecumenism has developed with Catholics and Protestants working side by side at soup kitchens and night shelters.” The Rev. Joanna Adams, a minister at Central Presbyterian and a close partner in the night shelter effort, said of her at the time.

“She never asks ‘can it be done?’ but ‘what is the faithful thing to do?’ “Mrs. Adams said, “and then moves on to find a way to accomplish it.”

In a telephone conversation with The Georgia Bulletin on Feb. 15, Mrs. Adams said she believes Betti Knott was responsible for most of the shelters being opened in Atlanta.

“Sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes in front of the scenes, she would tell everyone ‘God can use you to help the homeless.’ Whether it was making sandwiches, getting cots, giving pep talks. “Don’t worry, it’s a breeze,’ she would tell them,” Mrs. Adams said.

“The city will not be as good a place to live without her in it. She’s been a mother and a priest to the homeless, although she wouldn’t want me to say that. They all know Betti and all love Betti.”

“I was glad when she got on Leadership Atlanta and made all those yuppies think about all the things they hadn’t thought of before,” Mrs. Adams, now pastor at North Decatur Presbyterian Church said.

“She has the gift, which some young people have, but not too many adults, of being able to cut through the rot, see the truth and tell the truth.”

Another close co-worker in the ministry, Sister Margaret Anoy, I.H.M., leader of the Cursillo in the archdiocese, called her “the Catholic presence in the Task Force for the Homeless and the city.”

“It was she who called me to get the Cursillo involved when she and Father John Adamski were trying to get the night shelter rolling at St. Anthony’s,” Sister Margaret recalled. The shelter opened in January, 1983. Volunteers staffing it were cursillistas, she said.

Mark and Katie Bashor are two friends who have worked with her in the Central Presbyterian ministry since 1981. “She earned the nickname ‘Ubiquitous Betti.’ I used to call her U.B. She was everywhere, always knew what was going on, always willing to help. She would pitch in when others were falling apart and quietly bring it all back together,” Mark Bashor said. “She has been an anchoring point for me.”

Father Adamski said “her enthusiasm for this ministry stayed with her all along.” And he is grateful for her willingness to try and solve “the situations that come to the rectory door,” when he was pastor at St. Anthony’s, where the society’s office was once located, and now at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, next door to the relocated central SVDP office.

“Her steadfastness has been a special gift,” the Shrine pastor said.

Melbourne, Mrs. Knott said, is a much larger city than Atlanta and 25 percent of the population of the state of Victoria is Catholic. The entire society in Australia, she said, encourages volunteer participation, or as they say, “helping out your mate (friend). They are a people who are closer to base survival. There is a pioneer mentality in many areas.” The metropolitan areas are similar to those in the U.S., she said, “lots of crime and lots of little ghettoes.”

Because of the state’s higher population and the larger percentage of Catholics than in this archdiocese, there is a broader scope of the SVDP, “which has been going strong in Australia since 1854.”

There are 350 conferences – 321 adult and 29 youth – in the state. The council operates four overnight shelters, three youth hostels, 10 emergency accommodations, two refugee centers, six aged persons hostels, three holiday homes, four emergency aid centers and one nursing home. This is an addition to the host of other actions for the needy – personal visitations, family aid, emergency and disaster aid, burial of the dead and other responses similar to those made by Vincentians around the world.

Ozanam House, the only free shelter in Melbourne, was visited by Pope John Paul II on his trip to Australia in November, 1986. This shelter offers beds to almost 200 men each night, breakfast, lunch and evening meal, hot showers and clean clothes, day center activity, medical and optical services, financial advice, and contact with psychiatrists, hospitals and housing services.

Jim Needham said the council here in Atlanta has benefited from Mrs. Knott’s “great awareness and compassion for people in need…and the tremendous strength she exhibits…She really focuses her life on trying to help people in need.”

Last year, he continued, “we distributed over $1 million, along with our (parish) conferences in the archdiocese and our costs were well below 10 percent. It’s just an amazing operation and a lot of the success is due to Betti’s management skills. We are on firm financial footing.”

She manages the funds, supervises two social workers and her secretary in the Atlanta office and three thrift operations (stores), he said. “As executive director she keeps the pulse going. We provide the overall direction.”

“She helps all of us,” her secretary, Randy Guekenberger, said. “She tells us to listen with our hearts. She works with you if you have a problem…tries to think about your mental welfare. She was instrumental in getting us retirement pensions and insurance.”

“She worked hard to get the retirement and insurance programs,” Dick Schweitzer, a recently retired member of the board, said. In the years since 1979, he went on to say, the number of conferences has expanded from about 16 or 17 to over 30 at present; she brought administrative and professional talents to the central administration, and national recognition to the office because of her contacts.

She was able to get good people work in the thrift operations, worked with the late Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan to strengthen participation in the annual St. Vincent de Paul Sunday drive, and was responsible for a number of corporate groups making contributions, Schweitzer added. “We’re all very proud of her accomplishments.”

Ellen McCoy, vice president of the council board and a member of Transfiguration parish in Marietta, said she felt Mrs. Knott’s work “flowed out of her awareness of the truth of the Scriptures which calls each of us to personally care for those in need. On many occasions she felt it was ‘mandated’ as a personal responsibility. Her work with us was really engendering this into us.”

“In another area she really worked at being community within the society. She was trying to renew the founder’s belief that the society could work well only if the members realize that they, too, are needy and dependent in some way and they need the support of others who do this particular work with those in need,” Mrs. McCoy said.

Betti Knott will go to Australia knowing this support will be offered by her new Vincentian community. She is as confident of this as she is of her own preference for its ideals.

My commitment is to the society. I don’t want to work for anyone else. I love the society, I love my job. I’m going to be working for the same organization, in a different town.”