By Rita McInerney

A housing development for the elderly sponsored by Catholic Social Services won approval of the five-member Forsyth County Board of Commissioners at its meeting Sept. 25 in the courthouse in Cumming.

Despite heavy rain, the meeting room was crowded with most of the people present supporting the development in their county, according to Steve Brazen, executive director of CSS.

The proposal to build 20 units for elderly of low to moderate means had been rejected Aug. 29 by the Forsyth County and City of Cumming Planning Commission. At that session, nearly 100 opposition, some of it with racial implications.

The development on five acres at Bald Ridge Acres would include an office, laundry facilities, and a meeting room in one building. The units would be efficiency and one-bedroom. Brazen said application for 100 percent financing by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had been made. If approved it would include subsidies for low-income tenants. Cost is expected to be about $800,000.

The commissioners gave each side five minutes to argue its case. Speaking for the development was the architect, Bill Foley of THW and Associates, Inc., in Atlanta. Three people spoke for the residents against the development. All said they were not opposed to housing for the elderly but they did not want it in the Bald Ridge Acres areas.

Eighty percent of the care to frail elderly is being provided by families, friends and neighbors, she told her audience in describing how such volunteer programs are crucially needed.

Twenty-five percent of the people in the average parish, she pointed out, are over 65 and 12 percent of the general population has passed this age. It is predicted that by 2030, 65 million people in this country will be over 65.

Many women are now finding themselves in what she called the “sandwich generation,” raising children and taking care of elderly parents.

“We need to develop a vision of what it means to be growing old in Church and society,” she urged the women.

Dr. Zoila Diaz focused on community, holiness, adulthood, ministry and prayer in her presentation. Director of the Office of Lay Ministry in the archdiocese of Miami, she came to this country from Cuba in 1960.

“We do not allow ourselves to be treated as adults,” she told the large congregation of women. Rather, women agree to “Whatever Father says,’ or ‘Whatever Sister says.’ Mothers entrusted with human life cannot be trusted to do something right at Church level,” she remarked to murmurs of agreement.

Feminine qualities such as compassion, the ability to forgive and to create bonding have to be accepted by Church leadership, she said. And while she hasn’t experienced it personally, she admitted, she believes sexism is widely present in the Church and in the culture.

“That action is saying that God doesn’t believe we are powerful enough for Him to work through women.”

Sister Eileen Fane, senior director for Latin America, spoke on how mothers and children are assisted by CRS around the world. Afterward, she told of being just the week before at a camp filled with thousands of Salvadorian refugees in Honduras. Now, with repatriation to begin in a few weeks, the refugees, some of whom have been in camps almost eight years, will return home better equipped to earn a living.

“Several thousand women have learned skills to turn their lives around,” she said of training program sponsored by CRS. They have been trained in metalworking, in basic carpentry, as shoemakers.

Outgoing President Mary Ann Kramer of Lucan, Minn., said in an interview her two-year term, as president has been an “experience to broaden my own horizon and to share with other people what I think is a marvelous organization.”

“We need to be tuned to women today,” Mrs. Kramer, mother of eight adult children, said. In the past parish flowers, or such tasks viewed as women’s work. “Today we’ve added issues. It’s easy to raise money and to cook for funerals but to attract women today we have to have a mixture … in this fast-paced world, people have become more selective in getting involved.”