kailah span's List: Philadelphia Religion

The 1970”s also marked Father Paul’s and the Advocate’s increasing involvement in another area of inequality-the role of women in the Episcopal Church. In 1974, Father Paul participated in the ordination of the first 11 women into priesthood. Although the ordination was highly controversial, this event marked a new era for both the Episcopal Church and the Church of The Advocate. He was widely known and revered. At the request of then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Father Paul participated in the international peace conference in Iran that was forbidden by the U.S. government. He was honored far and wide.

Measure of Self-Respect. The decisive element, which has eluded most conventional job programs, was the inculcation of personal pride that Negroes so often lacked. "You can't train someone by just putting him behind a machine," Sullivan maintains. "You've got to see that he's properly motivated and has a measure of self-respect." The students, many of them migrants from the rural South, were taught the achievements of their own race and of other minorities. Not only were they told how to conduct themselves in a job interview, a basic lesson other such courses sometimes overlooked; they were also instructed in the basic urban skills—shopping wisely, handling money, attending to personal hygiene and grooming.

Sister Mary Scullion and Joan Dawson McConnon co-founded Project   H.O.M.E., a nationally recognized organization that provides supportive   housing, employment, education and health care to enable chronically homeless   and low-income persons to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty. Under   their leadership, Project H.O.M.E has grown from an emergency winter shelter   to 447 units of housing and three businesses that provide employment to   formerly homeless persons. Project H.O.M.E. also prevents homelessness in a   low-income neighborhood in North Central Philadelphia. This initiative   includes greening vacant lots, economic development, home ownership for the   working poor, and the Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology   Labs—a 38,000 square foot, state-of-the-art center that offers   comprehensive educational and occupational programming. To date, Project   H.O.M.E. has leveraged over $50,000,000 in equity towards housing and   economic development.