Faithful Fools Street Ministry Analysis

This fall semester was devoted to spending time at the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, a non-profit organization dedicated to understanding and serving the impoverished constituents of the San Francisco Tenderloin. The Faithful Fools’ mission stems from the need to address the realities and struggles of communities in poverty, often enacted by oppressive power structures and the socioeconomic hierarchy. As poverty and homelessness are consistent across the globe, as well as the ways in which the privileged deal with it, the Faithful Fools Street Ministry uses an alternate approach to social justice – one that challenges individuals to think differently about the ways in which disadvantaged communities are “served”; specifically, whether pre-existing

It is a highly [dramatic] form; for every ritual has a moral aspect, expressing, mobilizing social relationships, confining or altering relationships, maintaining a reciprocal and mutual balancing system…It is a means of reaffirming loyalties, testing and changing them or offering new ones to replace old loyalties, always expressed in a kind of muted symbolic display designed to elicit a symbolic response which changes attitudes and values without major and unlimited conflict.” (Cathcart) He draws upon examples such as the Black Panther movement of Oakland and their open carry of weapons around white government officials, as well as the “Catonsville 9” and the burning of draft records as a display of anti-war sentiment. Through these protest strategies the Black Panthers displayed their narrative of no longer wanting to be held accountable under a system that had purposely disenfranchised the African-American community for so long, while the Catonsville 9 drew upon their experiences in Catholic faith and charity to discuss the possibly imminent harm to the American communities they have served with the then-encouraged use of chemical warfare. (Cathcart) Within these two instances of confrontational social movement, Cathcart points out the “forced dialectical enjoinment in the moral arena between the perpetrators and the established order” (Cathcart) -- in other words, the way in which these movements utilized their related experiences and individual voices to engage the oppressor in conversation and generate an immediate need for change. The collective of voices and experiences within the overarching social movement serve to create a sense of discomfort in an otherwise “comfortable” oppressive