Spiritual Feud Over Homeless Divides City : Social services: Monsignor and a councilman both cite religion in arguing whether downtown San Diego shelter should expand or shrink its services.

SAN DIEGO — On paper the issue is a fight over what to do with an industrial section of downtown San Diego called Centre City East, a jumble of warehouses, vacant lots, bus and trolley yards, and aging businesses with fences topped by barbed wire.

But the fight could just as well be called a struggle for the soul of California’s second-largest city.

On one side is Roman Catholic Msgr. Joseph Carroll, the cherubic “Father Joe” who has cajoled and politicked his way to local fame and national acclaim as the head of the St. Vincent de Paul Village for the Homeless, which has 270 employees and an annual budget of $20 million.

From a complex of buildings in Centre City East, St. Vincent’s dispenses food, shelter, clothing, child care, medical care and rehabilitation services to the homeless, the addicted and the desperate.

On the other side of the Centre City East dispute is Councilman Juan Vargas, who studied to be a priest before leaving the Jesuits to get married and attend Harvard Law School. As a Jesuit novice, he had worked with the homeless on Skid Row in Los Angeles and at a soup kitchen in the Bronx.

The talk in political circles is that the engaging, media-friendly Vargas, a moderate Democrat elected to the City Council two years ago, may be on the fast track to higher office. Right now, though, the track has led to an angry collision with Father Joe.

Carroll wants St. Vincent’s to grow in scope and size, to serve more meals and more people. He sees only good: that St. Vincent’s serves not only the homeless but also the low-income residents of the heavily Latino neighborhoods just east of Centre City East.

Vargas wants St. Vincent’s to shrink, to stop feeding street denizens who are high on booze or drugs. Attracting the homeless and shiftless with free food is only enabling them to wallow in their addiction, he argues, as well as hurting the neighborhoods.

Vargas believes that St. Vincent’s is a roadblock to San Diego realizing its dream of building a downtown sports arena and attracting a professional basketball or hockey team. The council’s preferred site for an arena is a block from St. Vincent’s, which Carroll says is fine.

The dispute includes clashes of politics, social welfare and theology. Each combatant believes he is acting as Christ would if he were trying to solve the problem of homelessness.

“If someone was on drugs or alcohol and killing themselves or others, I don’t think Christ would say, ‘That’s interesting, now here’s some free food,’ ” Vargas said. “He would say, ‘Wait a minute, you have a sin, and your sin is addiction, and I’m not going to let you continue in your addiction.’ God was tough like that.”

Many of those being fed free at St. Vincent’s get $291 a month from the General Relief welfare program and use it to buy drugs or alcohol, Vargas asserts. Take away the free food, he reasons, and they will “hit rock bottom” and be forced into changing their lives.

Carroll, who has been lauded by the United Nations and the Bush and Clinton administrations, calls Vargas’ notion flawed social theory and flawed Christianity.

“You know,” Carroll said mockingly, “I remember there were 5,000 people with nothing to eat and Christ fed them, and he didn’t require drug testing. Was he being an enabler? Christ offered opportunities and so do I. He even chose 12 guys and one failed him, but he still gave them a chance.”

That Vargas studied to be a Jesuit does not impress Carroll. “A lot of people spend time in the seminary,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they get anything out of it.”

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The fight between the priest and the ex-novice has been topic No. 1 on the local political agenda for weeks.

Much of the anger aimed at Carroll has come from neighborhood and Latino activists, who have long complained about the impact of St. Vincent’s and other social service agencies in Centre City East, including the Salvation Army, the San Diego Rescue Mission, a detoxification center, and a day center for the homeless.

Carroll’s donors have also been targeted for criticism. Among the financial angels of St. Vincent’s have been McDonald’s owner and former Padres baseball team owner Joan Kroc, the late shopping center magnate Ernie Hahn, BMW-Honda dealer Bill Hoehn and developer Douglas Manchester, as well as IBM, Bank of America, Chevron, Cox Cable and San Diego Gas & Electric.

“These well-heeled folks come down here and give to Father Joe and feel real good about it,” said activist Al Ducheny, who is married to Assemblywoman Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego). “They don’t care if our neighborhoods are destroyed by what they’re doing.”

Even novelist Joseph Wambaugh, who lives in San Diego, offered a pro-Vargas view to a newspaper columnist: “Father Joe is a world-class enabler.”

Carroll protests that the real magnet drawing the homeless to neighborhoods adjoining Centre City East is a welfare office in the middle of Barrio Logan, a half-mile from St. Vincent’s.

St. Vincent’s had asked to have the office put at St. Vincent’s but the idea was rejected by the county government, Carroll said.

San Diego Municipal Judge Robert C. Coates, author of the book “A Street Is Not a Home--Solving America’s Homeless Dilemma,” said San Diego should “give prayerful thanks” that it has Father Joe.

“If Mr. Vargas mentions Jesus Christ, I would remind him of the tale of the good Samaritan,” Coates said. “The good Samaritan diagnosed the evil and provided an interim solution. I ask rhetorically, where is Mr. Vargas’ solution and where has he taken us?”

Mayor Susan Golding, who has been a longtime supporter of St. Vincent’s but recently has sided with Vargas in his concern about problems in adjoining neighborhoods, plans to bring Carroll and Vargas together and urge them to drop their feud and start talking again.

“The last thing we ought to do is make this a theological discussion,” she said.

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Vargas, who, at 33, retains a boyish exuberance and loves to drive around his blue-collar district in his souped-up 1965 Mustang, admits to a certain ambivalence in picking a political fight with a revered figure like Carroll.

“It feels strange for a devout Catholic like me to oppose Father Joe,” he said. “Even my mother is upset with me. Some of my friends ask me what I’m going to do next--criticize Mother Teresa?”

Carroll, 53, who came to St. Vincent’s in 1982, was particularly annoyed when Vargas was quoted as saying he opposed public funding for St. Vincent’s because Carroll can always get all the money he needs from Kroc.

The controversy hit the boiling point in August when the council adopted a plan for Centre City East that would, if enforced, prohibit St. Vincent’s or any other social service agency from providing meals to anyone except people who are housed on their premises. Carroll vows he will defy any such restriction.

St. Vincent’s has beds for 850 people, but serves meals to another 600 to 800 “non-guests” a day. Many of those sleep on downtown streets.

A large number of homeless people--often scruffy and dirty--are seen daily in the blocks around St. Vincent’s. The nub of the argument is whether they would be there if St. Vincent’s was restricted to feeding only full-time residents.

“If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re only going to create a homeless ghetto,” Vargas said. “Father Joe believes the more the merrier, but he doesn’t seem to realize that real neighborhoods, with real children and real people who worry about their safety, live right next to his homeless village.”

The free food, Carroll says, is the way to entice the homeless or the addicted to volunteer for rehabilitation classes, job training or substance-abuse counseling. “I can’t drag you in for rehabilitation, I have to invite you,” he said.

Talk of Carroll leading a recall drive against Vargas has cooled. Not so the distress Carroll feels over what he says is a neglect of the homeless by Vargas and the City Council.

“They’re not solving city problems,” Carroll said. “They’re all running for election, and I think that’s dumb.”

Vargas sees it differently: “I like Father Joe personally. But on this matter, he’s wrong.”