ANEU Kitchens owner Meridith Coyle places her hand on the St. Padre Pio glove in the narthex of St. Norbert Church before entering the Team Hope event. Displayed at all Team Hope meetings, the Padre Pio glove is a relic that the faithful touch to receive the saint’s assistance. Team Hope founder Ed Morris attributes some 25 local “miracles” to the glove he loans to families in need of healing.
The late great Flyer, Bernie Parent, the very much alive Hall of Fame Villanova basketball coach, Jay Wright, and pro hockey phenom Johnny Gaudreau, lost tragically to an alleged drunk driver while bicycling last year, have something in common – and it has nothing to do with sports.
Each has been a standard bearer for Team Hope – an extraordinary local movement, more than 6,000 strong, part tent revival, part Woodstock – that rocks St. Norbert’s in Paoli every few months.
To put these Team Hope “Friendship Celebrations” in perspective: A few hundred might show for a typical Sunday Mass. More than 700 souls turned out for Team Hope last week, its biggest night since its founding in 2018.
Drawing them to Paoli are the ministrations and small miracle that is one Ed Morris, 77, real estate developer and devoted grandfather by day, prayer warrior and lay preacher by night.
Team Hope founder Ed Morris with the late Flyers great Bernie Parent and his wife, Gini. The Parents were regulars at Team Hope celebrations. Morris says he once knew almost everyone who came to Team Hope meetings. The meetings have so exploded, he personally knows only 20 or 30 percent of attendees.
Years ago, we had hoped to profile Morris in SAVVY. Our working headline: “St. Ed.”
In those days and for six years, St. Ed walked the streets of Kensington, seeking out young women lost to addiction.
You can get better. God loves you, he would tell them, slipping each a $5 bill, a candy bar and a wooden ring blessed by the Pope.
No, look what I’ve done. He can never forgive me, the young women would respond.
He already has, Ed would rejoin, his otherworldly blue eyes blazing.
In 2018, he dreamed bigger, plastering giant “Divine Mercy” Jesus banners on 30 city buildings. Maybe kids will see them, he reasoned. If even one lost soul put her faith in Jesus and got off the streets…
One young woman who saw those banners brought down the house at last week’s Team Hope gathering.
Jacqueline was deep in addiction and had left her two kids in 2018 when Morris approached her in Kensington. The two became friends. Morris would urge her to get help, often sweetening his plea with a vanilla cream donut. Those donuts were “a little bit of heaven when I was stuck in my own hell,” Jacqueline recalls.
One day, Jacqueline allowed Morris to drive her to Recovery Centers of America in Devon. When he returned two weeks later to check on her progress, Jacqueline was gone. She was back on Kensington Ave.
The two lost touch for seven years until a few weeks ago when Ed was sitting in a parking lot in Wayne and received a text from Jacqueline:
I am sorry I messed up the opportunity you laid out for me back then, but the seed was planted and I am finally free of my addiction. I’m back in my kids’ life and I’m rebuilding now so I can be better than I ever was before. I just wanted you to know I didn’t forget the encouragement and the work you put into my life.
Last Wednesday night, Morris shared Jacqueline’s story and then, Lazarus-like, she walked out to the lectern. Seven hundred people rose rapturously to their feet, hearts full, eyes watering. The ovation was thunderous.
“It took seven more years of self-inflected torture,” she explained to the assembly. “I was lost, unable to give or receive love but God was working in my life. I always knew I’d make it out.” Jacqueline announced she was 14 months sober. “I can honestly say that I love myself today.”
Jacqueline receives a congratulatory hug and sustained applause after her speech. About 1,200 people receive telephone texts from Team Hope at 3 p.m. each weekday, asking them to pray for a list of local people in need of healing.
Dramatic testimonials like Jacqueline’s are a fixture at Team Hope celebrations. So are an inspiring theme – last Wednesday’s was “Plant a Seed” – and Team Hope’s house rock band. That night’s playlist: John Denver’s “Country Home,” the lyrics tweaked to include the names of dozens of high schools with Team Hope acolytes, among them Conestoga, Lower Merion, Radnor, every area Catholic high school, and independent schools like Agnes Irwin and Haverford; “Jerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line”; and Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”
A who’s who of local Catholic movers and shakers attends Team Hope’s meetings.
A sizable contingent of Archbishop Carroll alums always shows – Morris is a ’76 alum.
Hall of Fame goalie Bernie Parent was a regular. Two weeks after his passing, his widow, Gini, and her mother sat in the pews.
In a throwback Flyers jersey, the first speaker, Tom Russell, paid tribute to the legendary goalie.
Minutes later Team Hope founder Morris took the mic to remember another fallen hockey great, his own son-in-law, Johnny Gaudreau.
Ed Morris with his late son-in-law Johnny Gaudreau when Gaudreau played for the Calgary Flames.
“It was the roughest year you ever imagined but we’re getting better,” said Morris, 66, who mostly lives with his daughter, Meredith, in Ohio these days, helping care for her and Johnny’s three children ages 3, 2 and 1.
Morris wears his late son-in-law’s jersey at last week’s Team Hope celebration as he talks about his family’s slow but steady recovery from a devestating loss. Seven-time NHL All Star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother, Matthew, were killed by an alleged drunk driver while bicycling in rural New Jersey the night before what was to have been their sister’s wedding.
But Morris was merely the warm-up act.
The headliner was former Villanova Men’s Basketball Coach Jay Wright, who regularly attends Mass at St. Norbert and lives minutes away in Radnor.
Archbishop Carroll girls basketball players, boys baseball players and National Honor Society members had come by the busload to hear him.
The Hall of Fame coach assured them that nerves are normal. That cool, collected image Wright projected on the sidelines all those years belied a roiling cauldron, he admitted.
“I was a mess the whole time. What carried me was my faith and my family. Every night I said the Lord’s Prayer and the Serenity Prayer over and over again to get to sleep. Some say that’s meditation. No, man. That’s desperation,” he said, only half joking.
When people ask Wright about his secret sauce for winning NCAA National Championships, he doesn’t talk about preparation, strategy or teamwork. He talks about faith and how team chaplain Father Rob Hagan “always kept us grounded.”
Touching on the evening’s theme, Wright said he and Hagan planted two seeds in their players: a positive attitude and humility.
“God loves ordinary people. Just because we’re doing extraordinary things, we’re still ordinary.”
And perhaps most instructive to the young souls in attendance: “It was never our goal to win, it was always to be the best student, the best player, and the best person we can be.”
Wright’s teams famously sported the credo, HUNGRY AND HUMBLE, on their wristbands. Wright never had trouble with the hungry part, but confessed to struggling mightily with humility early in his tenure at Villanova. If you run into him on the Main Line or Ocean City, ask him to tell you the butter story. It’s pure gold.
The next Team Hope Friendship Celebration is set for 7 p.m. Dec. 10 at St. Norbert in Paoli.
An absolutely fabulous accoun of this wonderful evening. I don’t know how you captured so much of the essence unless you filmed the whole night and played it back. Great journalism Caroline
Buck
Thank you so much, Buck. My answer: I took copious notes!!! A friend invited me to tag along. I’m so glad I did. If you get a chance, check out the reel I created for Instagram. My Instagram handle is @savvymainline
that’s just how i found it minutes ago…texting my contacts… well done !!!
Thank you so much for sharing this story. I was sorry to have missed it. But your writing put me right in the room.
You would have loved it, Tracy. It was an extraordinary evening.