Hope Springs Eternal for Fr. Tritz, SJ

At a TV talk show some years back, Fr. Pierre Tritz, SJ was asked the question on many minds: “ Is there hope for this country?”

This white-haired Jesuit, who has been called the “Mother Teresa of the Philippines,” answered without hesitation:  “Sure, there is hope.” But he also stressed, “We have to develop cooperation among the many people who can afford, so that they can give more attention to those in extreme poverty.”

Tritz founded the Educational Research & Development Association (ERDA) Foundation, which thrives principally on the element of hope. “L’espoir,” as he terms it in his native French--hope for the children of the streets, that they will one day walk out of the darkness of poverty, despair, ignorance and lack of opportunity. In pushing his self-appointed mission, he seems to have little intention of slowing down. He likes to say that he’s the oldest-working Jesuit (he turns 95 on Sept. 19, 2009).

He has always stressed that the only way for the poor to break the vicious cycle of poverty is to get proper education and skills training. To him these are “basic human rights” and if a child is not developed in the early years, “it will be too late.”  Since 1974, ERDA has supported impoverished children in public elementary schools by providing expenses for books, school materials, uniforms, projects and transportation.

Tritz realized early on that even if public elementary education is free, many children from very poor families still drop out because of shame at not having these essentials. For the past 34 years ERDA has helped some 300,000 children who might otherwise have become part of the alarming drop-out statistics. This year it’s  supporting close to 30,000 in pre-school and grade school.

By the early 1990s he also realized that if the Philippines were to move forward industrially, it had to have a wide pool of trained youth.  It broke his heart to see so many able-bodied youth fall into drugs and crime because they were idle.

In 1994 he put up the five-year ERDA Technical-Vocational High School (ERDA Tech)  in Pandacan, Manila, where students from the poorest families in Metro Manila can earn, free of charge, a high school diploma as wll as Tesda-approved training in any of a dozen technical skills.

In the past 14 years, over 1,000 students have graduated from ERDA Tech. Many of them now enjoy good jobs with companies and a number have gone on to college, sponsored by their employers. One thing Tritz’s efforts have achieved is to open the eyes of the affluent to the plight of the poor.  Despite his advanced age, Tritz still manages to go on his periodic begging trips abroad for ERDA, the most recent being last year with Fr. Johnny Go, SJ, Erda’s Chair, to Europe.

Fr. Tritz has been a Jesuit for more than 75 years and had taught at the Ateneo Graduate School, the Araneta University, UE, FEU and Centro Escolar.  But it was in 1974 when he firmly focused on what was to be his life mission.

In the 1960s he was disquieted by young students dropping out of grade school because of extreme poverty (12-15 percent in Grade 2 and increasing toward the upper grades).

Alarmed,  Tritz and his first volunteer, Betty Reyes of the Aristocrat Restaurant family, went to the Juan Luna Elementary School in Sampaloc, got a list of the drop-outs and convinced their parents to send them back to school by offering to sponsor their expenses.  With six student-beneficiaries he began ERDA in 1974.  In addition to its basic program of sustaining kids in school, ERDA’s complementary programs include pre-schools, livelihood development, health care, and shelter and aid for street children and scavengers.

“Pierre Tritz just went on and on, and the world has to make way for this man who knew where he was going,” noted the Ateneo University when it gave him the St. Ignatius Award in 2000.

In 1978 he put up the Foundation for the Assistance to Hansenites (FAHAN) and in 1995 the Albert Schweitzer Association of the Philippines (ASAP), a free legal assistance group for abandoned children, street children and those arrested for crimes.

President Corazon Aquino once said, “India has Mother Teresa, Egypt has Sister Emmanuelle, and the Philippines has Fr. Tritz.” His untiring efforts to help underprivileged Filipinos have won him innumerable awards here and abroad.  Truly, Fr. Tritz’s fidelity to the Ignatian dictum of being “a man for others” is crystal-clear. Long may his life continue to bear fruit.

- Belinda Olivares-Cunanan