Tim Marx

Tim Marx, 64, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis for the past 10 years, will become president emeritus and focus on special projects for the nonprofit next year. A native of Detroit Lakes and lifelong Catholic who grew up in Rochester, Marx went on to become a lawyer, city attorney and deputy mayor of St. Paul, leader of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and of a nonprofit housing and community development organization in New York City, before joining Catholic Charities. Marx sat down recently via videoconference with The Catholic Spirit to reflect on his life and career. A member of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, Marx said he wants to spend more time with family and friends and discern what at this point, quoting a late Jewish rabbi, he can do for “God’s world with God’s time.” The conversation is edited for length and clarity.

Q. When you first arrived at Catholic Charities in 2011, how would you describe it as an organization?

A. I would say Catholic Charities was in flux, with a significant number of leadership transitions in a short period of time, and the community was in transition as it was coming out of but still mired in the Great Recession, and there was a great political divide at the state level. … My first job at Catholic Charities was to close on Higher Ground Minneapolis (homeless shelter, transitional and permanent housing and social services center), bring it to fruition so it could open in the spring of 2012, which it did, which was then the launching pad and the model for Dorothy Day Place (a similar complex in St. Paul that opened in 2017).

Q. Has housing been a big part of Catholic Charities since it was founded?

A. The major movement of Catholic Charities into housing and shelter really has occurred over the last 25 years, and it is really coincident with Tracy Berglund (senior director of Housing Stability) joining the organization. We had some shelters and some other housing-related programs … (but) that’s when our modern housing program started.

Q. What did Berglund see that keyed her into that need? Why the housing aspect?

A. This also coincided with increased homelessness as a much more, unfortunately, chronic condition in our community. And Catholic Charities … responds to the needs of those most in need. I think about the history of homelessness, how it is a relatively modern, unfortunate phenomenon in this region and across the country.

Q. As you’ve guided Catholic Charities, how has your faith entered into what you do?

A. Faith has been central to what I’ve done, forever. Catholic Charities is not unique to that. Catholic Charities provided a unique opportunity because of its foundation in Catholic social teaching. To have my day job married to my personal passion and faith, that’s a rare and lucky opportunity and something upon which I have relied significantly, quite frankly, particularly in these last several months with COVID and the economic turmoil and the aftermath of the (Minneapolis police custody death of African American) George Floyd.

And I also say that there are things that have happened at Catholic Charities that advanced in ways that to me were not fully explainable through connect the dots, or logic. And so, I believe that was faith in God at work.

Q. Please share one of those.

A. I look back at many of the challenges which Dorothy Day Place confronted — at the Legislature, in various transactions to get it to the scale that it needed to be, in raising $40 million of private funding in two years. There were periods when it looked like it just wasn’t going to happen, for any number of reasons. And all of a sudden you wake up and something had happened, and it wasn’t fully explainable. Why this (person), without much connection to the organization, calls and says, “How can I give $1 million to this?” Circumstances like that. There’s more at work there than human hands.

Q. You’ve talked recently of this time as an inflection point for the country and for Catholic Charities. Can you describe what that means to you?

A. I think the first section of Pope Francis’ (recent encyclical) “Fratelli Tutti,” Chapter One, “Dark Clouds Over A Closed World,” describes it well. COVID. A false populism. Is there a commitment to human dignity and structuring our laws and political systems to advance human dignity, unselfishness, recognizing that racism is a scourge, not something to be advantaged for political gain? Those dark clouds are circling our country and our world, and we have to find a way to let the sun shine through.

Q. How is it an inflection point for Catholic Charities?

A. For all those same reasons. We serve and advocate for those most in need. And those conditions, pointed to by the pope, are pushing against that, are making it more difficult. It’s swimming upstream or climbing up a hill with an extra 20 pounds in the backpack and your CamelBak is leaking. If this work is going to continue, it has to be much more widely supported by the public sector. …

COVID and George Floyd provide a tremendous opportunity to go back and heal racial divisions, to go back and pay attention to public health and recognize that when there is a significant event in our society, those who get impacted most negatively are the poor and disenfranchised, people of color, and that’s not the way it should be. How do we fix that? How do we go back to better?