The Story of Abraham House – How one thing led to another...

Sr. Simone Ponnet was a Belgian youngster when she decided to use her life to serve the poor. She joined the Little Sisters of the Gospel, an order whose mission is precisely that and in 1972 she asked to be sent to the Venezuelan jungle or to live in a prison cell and minister to inmates.

Her superiors chose another sort of jungle: New York City. The Little Sisters take jobs, using a small portion of their salary for subsistence; with the rest, they assist the needy. Simone found work cleaning houses in East Harlem, which she did for three years, walking as many as 86 blocks to and from work, collecting any useful items she found (chairs, tables) that had been discarded on the streets. She found lodging at Village Haven, a halfway house for women coming out of prison.

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The rooms had no doors, the walls had no paint, and the place had no director (she had suffered a nervous breakdown and disappeared). The bedding was as stained and ragged as anything you find in the street.

The two dozen women at Village Haven came and went as they pleased. They taught Simone English and soon she was repainting the house and ministering to their needs. Three months after her arrival in New York, Simone was joined by Sr. Rita Claus, another member of her order of nuns. A few years later, Sr. Amy Henry joined them. Sr. Rita went to work as a cook at Burger King and Sr. Amy found a job on an assembly line in Manhattan, manufacturing boom boxes.

The three women each had their a ministry. Simone began volunteering at the city prison, Rikers Island (which then had 8 chaplains and now has 60), Amy visited the city prisons and Bellevue prison wards, Rita worked as a practical nurse.

Meanwhile, Fr. Peter Raphael, who had been a priest in Appalachia while working as a welder, came to New York and was a detox aide in the Manhattan Bowery Project. From time to time he filled in as a chaplain at Rikers, and in l979 he began to say Mass regularly at the maximum-security unit where Simone was serving as a volunteer chaplain. She had been refused the salaried job because she was a woman counseling in a men’s prison. In the early ‘80s, she became one of the first women accepted by the state as a prison chaplain for men.

Fr. Peter was soon saying Mass in three of the 20 prisons on Rikers, with Simone focusing on the maximum-security unit and Amy now the chaplain in the hospital. In the course of this work they came to know and assist families of inmates who were at Rikers and elsewhere in the New York penal system. Close to 100 volunteers gathered around the ministry. Suddenly the chaplains found themselves being asked by judges to take and supervise prisoners whom the judges felt should not be behind bars.

This was the beginning of Abraham House, though it would not be incorporated or have that name for another dozen years. The first three prisoners (who remain close to the program to this day) were put up in rented rooms in the same building where the Sisters and Fr. Peter lived. This was over a soup kitchen in Brooklyn.

More families of Rikers prisoners began seeking the chaplains out for counseling and social services. It became clear that reconciliation between inmates and their relatives was essential to the prisoners’ chances of being rehabilitated. By the early 1990s, Department of Corrections personnel and judges looking for alternatives to incarceration, especially for first-time, non-violent offenders, were encouraging the chaplains to formalize the program. The founders named it for Abraham, the father of the three monotheistic religions, and after a long search found a ransacked building in Mott Haven. The doors opened in 1993.

Sr. Amy continues to work as a chaplain at Rikers (in the hospital and the facility for sexual criminals and notorious prisoners such as the Wendy murderers). The rest of her time is spent doing social outreach in the Mott Haven community and with prisoners’ families in New York.

Sr. Rita is a nurse in a mental health facility and has become a licensed masseuse so that she can use the skill particularly for chemo and AIDS patients. At Abraham House, she runs the Food Pantry, which provides weekly staples for 120 families.

Fr. Peter is retired as a Rikers chaplain and now oversees the Residents’ Program. He is the spiritual director of Abraham House.

Sr. Simone is Abraham House’s Executive Director.

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