Deacon Delbeke, 75, started with the idea that the two shower rooms in the former St. Elizabeth School building on the city’s near east side could be used to give homeless people a place to take a shower from time to time.
“I talked to Fr. Norm Thomas (the parish administrator) about it, and with his permission and encouragement from Sr. Mary Finn, HVM (of Sacred Heart Major Seminary), I began befriending homeless persons on the streets,” he said.
Deacon Delbeke said he found it wasn’t as simple as pulling up to a homeless person, and suggesting they accompany him somewhere they didn’t know anything about to take a shower — he needed to first earn their trust.
“I gave a lot of rides to the Rosa Parks Transit Center or to Manna Meals or someplace else they could get something to eat,” he said.
After a while, though, he was able to get them over to the building at East Canfield and MacDougall, where they could shower and receive clean clothes — and he would take their old clothes home to wash for them.
“At first, I wasn’t sure whether I could do that — whether I could stand the smell of their clothes — but I managed it. There was another problem, though: When I put them in the machine and turned it on, I wondered what was making the clanging noise in there. It turned out there were knives and bullets and other oddities hidden in their clothing,” Deacon Delbeke said.
His “ministry of personal hygiene” has expanded to include street preaching in front of the branch post office on East Milwaukee east of Woodward, and to the alcoholics who can usually be found sprawled out behind a nearby liquor store.
“I also found some homeless living in a pallet yard not far from there, where they had made what I call ‘21st-century slave shacks’ out of some of the old pallets there,” Deacon Delbeke continued.
The idea of starting his new ministry came to him as he was transitioning out of the previous ministry he launched in the former St. Elizabeth School — teaching inner-city youth to work on engines and to develop energy-saving vehicle design projects as part a program sponsored by the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance.
That program, called the Tuskegee Spirits (after the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame), was taken over by a group of black engineers, and has since morphed into a robotics education program.
Deacon Delbeke said he has no intention of retiring from his new ministry in the foreseeable future.
“I intend to keep going as long as God continues to give me the strength to,” he said.
