Friars’ farewell: Franciscans end 35 years of service in valley

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Jan. 26, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

After more than 35 years that have included jailed priests, angry mayors, bearded white men tapping their Birkenstocks to gospel music and robed friars hauling portable toilets to the homeless, the Franciscan friars said goodbye to the Las Vegas Valley Sunday.

The Rev. Michael Blackburn and Brother David Buer, the last in a long line of the friars who have stood up for the poor and others on the short end of the stick in the Las Vegas Valley since 1968, bade farewell during a packed Mass at St. James Catholic Church.

The Mass was attended by 21 Franciscans visiting from neighboring states and about 300 parishioners.

The loss of Blackburn and Buer marks the end of the order's work in the valley. The Western region of the Franciscans, who are itinerant by nature, has decided their presence is needed in other areas, Buer said.

The order's presence in economically depressed West Las Vegas, where St. James Church is, will be missed, but conversations with Buer, Blackburn and several of those who lived in Las Vegas in years past made clear that the Franciscans' work extended throughout the valley.

"It's a sad day to see them leave," said the Rev. Marion Bennett of the Zion Methodist Church nearby on North Revere Street and a community leader in the area for decades.

"People everywhere knew they were genuine and living for the sake of others," Bennett said.

Before Mass some of the friars talked about their work and offered a glimpse into the lives of some of the valley's least fortunate and most pained.

The Rev. Ben Innes of San Luis Rey Mission in Oceanside, Calif., served in Las Vegas from 1983 to 1985. Halfway through his stay, he was ordained a priest.

"I was ordained in Sin City," Innes recalled, laughing.

He went on to work with teens in trouble, which he found difficult because of what he called "their exposure to temptations (here)."

"They say, 'What happens here, stays here,' but teaching the youth that grow up in Las Vegas what's acceptable and what's not ... when there's so much tolerance of borderline, self-destructive behavior ... is not easy," he said.

Innes said success for him was helping one girl become the first in her family to graduate from high school without getting pregnant. The girl went on to study at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he said with pride.

Such one-to-one -- and larger -- triumphs began when the Rev. Louis Vitale became the first Franciscan friar to arrive on the scene in 1968. Now pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, Vitale did two stints in Southern Nevada, from 1968 to 1979 and from 1988 to 1992.

Vitale's first interest was in the predominantly black community that surrounded him in West Las Vegas.

"I tried to establish a presence in the neighborhood rather than a pastoral ministry as such," he said.

This approach comes from St. Francis himself, as described by Sister Debbie Lockwood, who spoke at Sunday's Mass.

"(St. Francis) said preach always -- if necessary, use words. Today, that would be ... 'Talk the talk and walk the walk.' "

Vitale walked the walk in Carson City, where he lobbied the Legislature on behalf of mothers on welfare.

"One of the reasons people say it was particularly good to have Franciscans in Las Vegas is that (the city) stands for materialism, a get-rich-quick image," he said.

"Franciscans stand for the poor."

Vitale also began work that continues to this day. He helped build an integrated parish, which Blackburn said was now about 50 percent black, 40 percent white and 10 percent Hispanic and others.

This effort created what Blackburn said was the only Franciscan-led church in the West with a gospel choir.

Bennett -- who has been a member of the local NAACP for decades -- said building an integrated parish in West Las Vegas was important.

"The only way prejudice is going to end is with this type of interrelating going on," he said.

Blackburn, who is soon off to Spokane, Wash., arrived to Las Vegas in August 1991, less than a year before riots swept the West Las Vegas -- and other parts of the nation -- in the wake of the Rodney King trial.

A neighbor may have saved his life that spring when she calmed a man who stood in the street outside, screaming something about "burning down the house with the white people."

Later, kids threw rocks at his car.

Blackburn's response? "I kept doing the same thing I was doing, showing them I was going to be here."

Years later the priest went on to work for better wages and benefits for immigrant workers as part of a coalition of faith-based groups.

And he continued celebrating Masses at St. James, accompanied by the choir.

Last year Vitale came back to the area -- to serve a prison sentence. The 70-year-old priest was jailed for three months at Nellis Prison Camp for trespassing on federal property while protesting the U.S. military's role in training Latin American death squads.

By that time, Brother Dave, as Buer is called by friends and enemies alike, had built a reputation as a "burr under the saddle" of local officials when it came to the homeless, Vitale said.

This included tussles with Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who once questioned the zoning permits given to a homeless daytime drop-in center called Poverello House the Franciscans had opened on Bartlett Street. Advocates speculated that Goodman was trying to run Buer out of town.

The robed friar also raised money to rent a portable toilet on a downtown street where the homeless began laying down bedrolls after police rousted them from another street blocks away.

Las Vegas officials trucked the toilet away days later, saying it was illegally obstructing a public right-of-way, even though the area is industrial and has virtually no pedestrian traffic.

Buer is off to an Apache reservation in Arizona in several weeks. He said he was leaving behind "an old cowboy pioneer town that's still making the transition to a major urban area."

He hoped he and his brothers had "planted seeds of gospel value" during the last 35 years.

Vitale, the man who started it all, said, "A few people may have been inspired by us.

"Who knows? Only God knows."