Zack is a man in his 40s. He had just moved to Los Angeles from Portland, Oregon, to be closer to his 22-year-old daughter who has made LA home. I met him in the parking lot of St. Francis Xavier Chapel in Little Tokyo as we both prepared to participate in the Aug. 1 Eucharistic procession through downtown’s Skid Row.
Zack has been settling into life in Los Angeles and found out about the procession at his new parish. He came to be a part of it, to pray, and to see for himself what Skid Row was all about. He told me a lot about Portland and its own homelessness crisis: how nearby state parks are over-populated by the unhoused, and how city parks provide rakes for parents to sift through the sand of play areas to remove used needles.
He was sad about the state of things back in Portland. When Saturday evening’s proceedings were about to start, I told Zack I would try to connect with him afterward to get his impressions of what he saw.
Inside, the monstrance — the beacon that would light the way of the procession — was prepared while the chapel became so full that the crowd spilled out into the parking lot.
The engine that drove the procession was provided by the Friars and Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ, who join forces for an annual mission on some of the toughest streets in Los Angeles every year. Their goal was to bring Jesus and acts of mercy in his name, to men and women who live lives of poverty and desperation.
Archbishop José H. Gomez, monstrance held high, began to lead us through the tony Little Tokyo neighborhood with its clean streets, night-out-on-the-town energy, and trendy restaurants to the heart of Skid Row. People living in tents, in cardboard, or just lying on the streets half-naked watched from the sidewalks. Wearing their brown Franciscan habits, the consecrated men and women stopped to offer them practical assistance. From the looks on the faces of the poor, the goal was being accomplished.
Reaching a few random people on the streets on a summer night may seem like bailing water on a sinking ship with a tablespoon. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) conducts a homeless count every year. It is not done according to the most scientific protocol: LAHSA staff and a legion of volunteers comb the streets in various parts of Los Angeles and count heads. The numbers have mostly remained consistent in recent years. In 2022, 41,980 homeless people were counted in the city; in 2023 it spiked to 46,260, remained flat in 2024 at 46,252 and then dipped by more than 3 percent with a count of 43,695.
That last number, a quantity that could almost fill Dodgers Stadium, is considered a success.
But statistics are just numbers in a chart, while every man, woman, and yes, child, on Skid Row is a story. Every one of them was once somebody’s pride and joy. Every one of them was somebody with a dream of the “good” life.
And each of them has a different story of how they got on Skid Row. Manuel Gomez, who processed with his wife and toddlers that night, had a story, too.
“Jesus was bombarding me on my Instagram account about it, and because it was on Skid Row I knew I had to come,” he answered when I asked how he’d found out about the event.
Manuel Gomez, DSW, who received his doctorate in Social Work just two weeks earlier, has an impressive résumé. He was a key member of the nation’s largest county Veterans Service Office, where he designed and led Los Angeles County’s strategy for justice-involved veterans. He currently heads VetPhoenix, a nonprofit dedicated to, in Archbishop Gomez’s words, “provide services to veterans with addiction, incarceration, and homelessness in their background.”
The VetPhoenix website says the organization develops “trauma-informed, scalable programs across the Veteran Sequential Intercept Model, delivering interventions at every level of the justice system.” In layman’s terms, it helps veterans who have fallen into drug or alcohol addiction, prison, or homelessness (or in the case of Manuel, all of the above) get their lives back.
In the parlance of the homeless landscape, Manuel has what is considered “lived experience.” He joined the United States Navy thinking it was going to be his career. An injury facilitated an early exit from the military, and his addiction to meth amphetamine facilitated an early entrance into homelessness, where he became one of those LAHSA statistics. Maybe in one of those years, it was his head peering out from his tent and being counted by a government official.
What Manuel still had then — when he was on the street, addicted to drugs and soon to be an official guest of the State of California penal system — was an abiding faith in God.
He had never abandoned his Catholic faith, despite his personal stumbles on his own Via Dolorosa. Today, he sounds like the man he has become: a devout man who loves his family and loves the homeless, especially the homeless veterans his organization helps every day.
“It is all done through the grace of God,” Manuel said.
When the Eucharistic procession ended, we all gathered in the parking lot of St. Francis Xavier Church. I found Zack again and asked him what he thought about his first walk through Skid Row.
“Portland is worse,” he told me, which is not a positive for either his former or his current hometown. Zack had that “look” that anyone with eyes and a heart feels when they see Skid Row up close and personal for the first time.
Zack was touched by what he saw as he looked at the issue through the prism of his own Catholic faith. He had no answer to the homelessness crisis, as no one fully does, but he understood he spent two hours praying and watching God at work. There was hope.
It is not a theoretical exercise to imagine that maybe Zack saw a future Dr. Manuel Gomez on the street that night. Someone who was still holding on to their faith, praying for a sign from God, and then seeing it come around the corner at San Pedro and 6th Street.
