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Life of Father Mac

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The Life of 'Father Mac'

Monsignor Ignatius D. McDermott, the co-founder of the Haymarket Center, has quite possibly done more than any other single person to ease the plight of addicted and homeless Chicagoans. After working for four decades to improve living conditions and access to treatment for the denizens of Chicago’s Skid Row, he was known as the "Apostle of the Alcoholics," the “Skid Row Priest,” and with great affection as “Father Mac.”

Father Mac, a native of Chicago’s South Side, was born on July 31, 1909. After studying at Quigley Preparatory Seminary and St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, he was ordained a priest in 1936. However, his lifetime of service to the addicted began to develop while he was on summer leave from the seminary in 1930. He worked at Arlington Park Race Track and commuted on the Northwestern rail line daily, leaving from the downtown terminal adjacent to Chicago's notorious Skid Row. Although the plight of Skid Row victims distressed him, he had no idea that his compassion for people on Skid Row would develop into a lifetime crusade against the disease of alcoholism.

From 1936 to June 1941, Father Mac was assigned to Maryville Academy in Des Plaines, Illinois. Maryville was a home for dependent children, and Father Mac saw that many of them had been harmed by the alcoholism of their parents His experiences at Maryville made Father Mac one of the first to suspect that alcoholism was not only an illness, but that it had a tendency to be inherited. This conviction was strengthened by several similar encounters with young parishioners at the South Shore’s Our Lady of Peace Church, where he served as assistant pastor from 1941 to 1946.

In 1946 Father Mac was named assistant director of the Chicago Archdiocese's Catholic Charities. His office at 126 N. Des Plaines St. put him back on the edge of Skid Row, where he again encountered those who had nowhere else to go. His new location also put him in close proximity to the Des Plaines Street police station, which housed "The Drunk Court" and its holding area for alcoholics. Father Mac was troubled by the routine of arrest and incarceration that he saw there: alcoholics would languish in basement cells at the Des Plaines lock-up for their 30-day sentences, be released, and start the cycle all over again. Clearly, the courts were not rehabilitating alcoholics. Something more had to be done.

Father Mac began to walk Skid Row nightly, visiting saloons and flophouses to gain the trust of people who were at the lowest points of their lives and to encourage them to seek help and turn their lives around. Later, with his recognition that alcoholics needed counseling and education to overcome their disease, Father Mac founded the Central States Institute of Addiction (CSIA) in 1963. This self-funded program offered in-depth training for individuals, groups, associations, and professionals involved in handling addictions. One of the most widely recognized and praised CSIA program was the Alcohol and Drug Assessment Services (ADAS), which was the state's first "Driving Under the Influence" program. This program was the model for similar methods of treatment now used throughout the nation.

In 1975, Father Mac, then president of the Chicago Clergy Association for the Homeless Person, and James W. West, M.D., later a director of the Betty Ford Center, co-founded the Haymarket Center. Haymarket was the first free-standing, social-setting detoxification center in Illinois. Initially funded by the Chicago Community Trust and the Joyce Foundation, it received state funding after a year of operation.

In 1979, Father Mac founded Intervention Instruction, Inc. (III) as a substance abuse education and prevention agency. It is one of the largest providers of rehabilitation education for Illinois residents convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol.

However, Haymarket was not the only expression of Father Mac’s compassion for those suffering from addiction. In 1963 he had also founded the McDermott Center for drug treatment, which later became the McDermott Foundation, and which provided funding to allow Father Mac to purchase a block of buildings in the old Skid Row neighborhood in 1983. Thus, the treatment center came to the people who needed it. The renovated McDermott Center is now the permanent home of Haymarket Center. In the years since it first opened, Haymarket Center has helped tens of thousands of men and women to recover from alcohol and substance abuse and again become healthy members of society.

Father Mac died at 95 of natural causes on December 31, 2004, having continued his involvement with Haymarket Center until his death. He received many tributes, but the one that perhaps sums up his life best, with an appropriate allusion to his love of baseball, said simply: “Lifetime cleanup hitter…95 seasons…safe at home.”

The many services and programs he developed, and the life of service he lived, give credence to Father Mac’s motto, as taken from St. Vincent DePaul:

"When you no longer burn with love, others will die of the cold."