Priest Gives Away Cash

From Christina Hoag of the Associated Press:
Father Maurice Chase celebrated his 90th birthday Tuesday by giving away green — and plenty of it.
The Catholic priest took $15,000 in cash to Skid Row and doled it out to hundreds of the city's most down-and-out residents outside the Fred Jordan Missions. Twenty wheelchair-bound people received crisp $100 bills, while the rest received $1 to $3 each.
"This is the Lord's work," Chase said as he shuffled along the motley assemblage watched over by police officers. "I come out here to tell them that God loves them and I love them, that someone is concerned about them."
Chase is an institution in Skid Row, where he has given away cash, plastic rosaries and blessings every Sunday on the same corner for 24 years. A throng of several hundred people waits for him every week, lined up in the order that he sees as putting the most vulnerable first: handicapped, women and children, couples and single men.
He makes a point of coming on Thanksgiving and Christmas, too, but this is the first year he's spent his birthday in the downtown neighborhood where people live mainly in shelters and on urine-stained sidewalks.
"It's the place that makes me the happiest. I just love it," said Chase, who wore a Notre Dame baseball cap and a patched, fraying cardigan over his clergy shirt. "I look forward to coming here."
The money comes from donations he receives from rich and famous people he met during his long tenure as assistant to the president of Loyola Marymount University. They include philanthropist Eli Broad; Dolores Hope, Bob Hope's widow; Barbara Sinatra, Frank Sinatra's widow; and Bob and Ginnie Newhart, he said.
The California native retired from Loyola about a decade ago.
To mark his birthday on St. Patrick's Day, the blue-eyed nonagenarian decided to give away 20 Ben Franklins to people in wheelchairs, whose plight moves him the most, he said. "It's hard enough being on Skid Row without being in a wheelchair," he said.
The crowd broke into choruses of "Happy Birthday" several times. A few regulars presented him birthday cards, to his delight.