At Their Service

Tiziana Dearing is the first woman to become president of Catholic Charities. Part of her vision for the new year? Never lose sight of the basics.

So tell me about your name.

It's Italian. It's from Titian, the painter. I was named after him.

With two little kids, how do you explain what you do every day?

I tell them I try to help people who need help. And we've been trying to inculcate our kids with that sense long before I came to Catholic Charities. So, for example, if they get something new, one of the things we do is, you give away something old, because if you have, you have an obligation to give and to share.

You've said you want basic needs to become "sexy" again. What did you mean?

The funding environment has really gone toward long-term sustainable change, and that's actually a very important thing. [But] you can go so far down the path of "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime" that you forget, "Could somebody please give the man a fish in the meantime? Because he's hungry!"

You say this is a hostile climate for the poor. How?

Our policy climate around economics, around families, is really very middle-class focused. We've lost the piece that's about the poor.

Why?

People in the policy arena debate and act based on where the voice is and where the votes are.

Are there ways in which Catholic Charities needs to refine its niche or its mission?

We need to try to serve the people that no one else will serve. Those things are going to shift as different competitors enter the environment.

And is there something that you see right now and think, we need to do more of that?

Refugee and immigration services is a piece of that. Another example clearly is English as a second language and adult education. [In] the city of Brockton, their waiting list for ESL is 2,000 people.

A conservative blog called you "a Hillary Clinton loving, George W. Bush hating, self-described 'moderate' who describes Terri Schiavo supporters as fierce zealots." What do you make of that?

[Laughs.] Well, I'm not going to please everybody. And it's not my job to. My job is to help manifest the social mission of the Church in service to our clients. And I hope that that will please a very large swath of Catholics, because one of the things that the broad diversity of Catholics have in common is this sense of justice and human dignity and solidarity.

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