Father Eugene Brake, a Catholic priest who co-founded the Washington area’s largest food bank and spent decades championing social justice, demonstrating on behalf of Soviet Jews, the antiwar movement and incarcerated people in Virginia, died July 20 at his home in Frederick, Md. He was 89.
His partner Lynn Brantley, with whom he helped start the Capital Area Food Bank, said the cause was multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer. Father Brake had left the priesthood around the late 1980s, in part because of their relationship.
Formed through a partnership between the United Planning Organization and the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, the Capital Area Food Bank opened in 1980 as a bridge between local agencies feeding the hungry and grocery stores looking to offload extra food.
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It was initially based out of a leaky warehouse in Northeast Washington, where it distributed just over 1 million pounds of food in its first year, including slightly dented cans and unwanted frozen dinners salvaged from wholesalers.
As Congress and the Reagan administration slashed funding for the food stamp program, now known as SNAP, the food bank grew to help fill the void, eventually moving into a bigger warehouse, opening a second location in Lorton, Va., and partnering with local organizations to pair food with health care, job training and educational programs. The group said it distributed 73 million pounds of food last year, half of which was fresh produce.
Father Brake “was the heart and soul of the place,” said Brantley, who served as the organization’s president and chief executive before retiring in 2012. “He was a gentle soul, but he knew how to go at things.”
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When a room in the warehouse needed to be expanded because of all the food coming in, Father Brake tore down the wall himself, even though he had recently fallen off his bike and broken his arm. He built a makeshift desk out of particle board when more workspace was needed. He organized the shopping area and ran errands and hauled potatoes. For a time, Brantley recalled, he picked up cans in a run-down pickup that had more than 500,000 miles on it.
“He had this funny, conspiratorial tone about him — he never took himself too seriously, even though he took the work of social justice very seriously,” said Hilary Salmon, a spokeswoman for the food bank.
Friends joked that he subsisted entirely on peanut butter and crackers, washed down at times with a Diet Pepsi. He seemed to bike or walk everywhere he went.
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“Life had a kind of beautiful simplicity for Gene,” said Grant P. Thompson, a consultant to the food bank. “He was one of those people who was a little bit easy to underestimate. Not highly educated, not sophisticated in any kind of way. But to be around him caused you to say to yourself, ‘How can I be better?’ His view on life was, we can all be better.”
Activism and advocacy were essential to his ministry. Although he was based for a time at Holy Name Catholic Church, off H Street NE, he also worked at McKenna House, a shelter for men transitioning out of homelessness, and served as a volunteer chaplain at Lorton Reformatory. For years, he rode his bike 30 miles each way to meet with inmates at the Virginia prison, whom he helped find jobs and housing upon their release.
When two inmates were hospitalized in 1984 with severe burns from a gas explosion, Father Brake helped draw attention to their plight, demonstrating for three days outside a neighboring landfill. Authorities said the blast was triggered by methane gas that had seeped through sewer lines and phone cables from the dump.
The Washington Post reported that Father Brake, “clad in clerical collar and standing before a bulldozer,” delayed a half-dozen garbage trucks operating at the landfill, where he called for the men’s sentences to be commuted. “They have suffered enough,” he said. “Their punishment is going to be for life. They look like victims of nuclear fallout.”
One of the men, Anthony Johnson, 25, soon died from his injuries. Father Brake successfully advocated on behalf of the other, Arthur Moody, who had been serving a sentence for unauthorized use of a car and receiving stolen property. He was granted clemency by President Ronald Reagan the next year, at age 27. “Justice has been done,” Father Brake declared.
By then, Father Brake was an old hand at using dramatic demonstrations to advance his cause. He was arrested four times during antimilitary protests at the Pentagon, including a 1977 demonstration in which he was said to have joined Father Philip Berrigan and other activists in throwing “human blood and ashes on the floor, the doors and the ceiling” of the Pentagon concourse, according to United Press International.
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Father Brake was later detained in Moscow while trying to aid Soviet Jews known as refuseniks, who had been denied permission to emigrate, and was arrested outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1985 during a protest marking Yom Kippur.
The Catholic hierarchy bristled at some of Father Brake’s advocacy, including an anti-apartheid demonstration he held outside the residence of future Cardinal Pio Laghi, Pope John Paul II’s official representative to the United States. The Post reported in 1989 that Cardinal James A. Hickey, the archbishop of Washington, refused a request to appoint Father Brake the official Catholic chaplain at Lorton.
“He’s kind of a prophet, and we need people like him a lot,” the Rev. Richard Fowler, Hickey’s secretary for social concerns, said at the time. “But he feels responsible only to God, and in a church like this, when you have people not willing to cooperate, it makes the cardinal very uncomfortable.”
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Before long, Father Brake left the ministry and moved in with Brantley. “It was a tough decision to make, because he was very dedicated,” she said, adding that their relationship “definitely played a role” in his decision to stop preaching.
For the next two decades, his advocacy continued unabated, including at the food bank, where he remained known by his priestly title.
“All I ever wanted was the same opportunities for everybody,” he said, according to a tribute from CEO Radha Muthiah. “That’s what drives me. It’s the very nature of Christianity.”
The second of 12 children, Eugene Francis Brake was born into an Irish Catholic family in Wilmington, Del., on July 24, 1934. His mother managed the home, and his father worked for nearly 50 years at a men’s clothing factory. “I was poor,” he said of his childhood, “but I never felt poor.”
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He and his siblings went to parochial schools — two of his sisters became nuns — and after working as an upholsterer he professed his vows with the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, who operated his Wilmington high school. He graduated in 1962 from Niagara University, studied at the De Sales Hall School of Theology in Hyattsville, Md., and was ordained to the priesthood in 1965.
The next day, he celebrated his first public Mass, not at a church but at the New Castle Correctional Institution, a Delaware prison where a whipping post still stood as a deterrent to crime.
In addition to Brantley, his partner of more than three decades, survivors include five sisters and three brothers.
Father Brake remained a regular presence at the Capital Area Food Bank until around 2012, when Brantley retired, shortly after the organization opened a new $37 million distribution center.
The group had come a long way, Father Brake noted at the dedication ceremony.
“We got this far by faith,” he said, “and we will move forward in hope. This building is proof.”
