Drawing from his experience as a former journalist who extensively covered Pope Francis, Gibson provided valuable commentary on the pope’s motivations and intentions behind the memoir.

According to Gibson, Pope Francis aims to humanize himself, emphasizing his relatability and shared experiences with everyday people. “He’s as surprised to find himself pope as anybody else, and he wants people to know that he’s had the ordinary experiences of everyone else,” said Gibson.

Thompson posed the question of whether this memoir is Pope Francis’ attempt to shape his legacy, to which Gibson responded affirmatively, “Yes, this really is Pope Francis trying to write his own legacy, set the record straight, and say, ‘This is what I meant. This is what I tried to do as pope. This is how I saw the church and the world at this time. That’s the record. That’s it.’”

Watch Pope Francis attempts to demystify Catholic Church in new memoir.

Prater launched Los Angeles Room & Board two years ago to support community college students in California. Much of that support takes place at Opportunity House, a 50-plus-bed residence in LA’s Westwood neighborhood that provides students with affordable housing, free meals, and a strong community to help get them to graduation.

Oprah Winfrey highlighted Opportunity House in her O Quarterly magazine this past summer, calling it a “triumphant story,” and Prater and several of the home’s residents were featured on the TODAY show earlier this month.

“I am very keenly aware of the power of higher education to transform lives,” Prater told TODAY. “If I can get these students through college, the opportunity that will unfold before them is limitless.”

Prater began working with college students at Central Michigan University, where he was a resident assistant while earning a bachelor’s degree in communication. At Fordham, he was a resident director at Queen’s Court Residential College. In 2013, he began working at California State University, Northridge, earning an Ed.D. in educational leadership and policy there in 2018. And from 2016 until March 2020, he worked full time in the dean of students’ office at California State University, Los Angeles.

Fordham Magazine caught up with Prater to talk about his educational journey, how it informs his work at LA Room & Board, and what’s at stake—for the workforce and nation—if students’ needs aren’t addressed.

Talk about your educational journey. Why did you leave school, and what brought you back to it?
I dropped out of school at age 16. I’m the 12th born of 14 kids. When my mom died unexpectedly, it was just my dad and the 14 of us in a three-bedroom house on Detroit’s west side. He was working 12- and 14-hour days at Ford Motor Company to keep the lights on and keep us all fed. As happens when kids are without a lot of supervision, they make poor choices, and so I just was not doing well academically. I think that dealing with my mom’s death threw me into a bit of a tailspin.

My dad had this “18 and out rule” because there’s so many of us. I wasn’t prepared for that at all, and we didn’t have many conversations about money, so I got evicted from my first apartment. I got evicted from another place. I did the whole couch-surfing thing—lived out of my car. That period between 18 and 23 was really touch-and-go.

I finally got my GED at community college and from there, I applied for Central Michigan University and really rediscovered my love for learning. Once I got that chance at school again, I just kind of dove into it headfirst.

Describe your experience working as a resident director at Fordham.
What I loved when I was a resident director is those were super-driven, super-focused students. I saw these students from all over the country who were just bright and creative. It was an inspiration to be around those students, to be honest. It was just a good time, watching students learn and grow and succeed and thrive. I really cherish my time at Rose Hill.

What was your light-bulb moment for starting LA Room & Board?
When I moved to California in 2013 and started to pursue my doctorate, I felt like the issues of student homelessness and student hunger really became salient to me. When you think about student homelessness, people think abject people on the streets, but for students, how it presents is sleeping in your car, couch-surfing, or sometimes even living in a shelter.

I read this book called Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, and it changed everything for me. People were struggling to get through school, but they were hungry about getting their education. This life and economics just got the best of them. That book made me think about my students at California State, and it made me think about my own experiences, and I was like, “I’ve got to do something about this. I can’t let this go on.”

So what’s the deal? Why is this such a problem?
A lot of the conversation about higher education has been about college access. How do we swing open the doors to the ivory tower? How do we make them wider so that more folks who have been historically excluded from this space can have access?

All these different “bridge” and opportunity programs get students into the university, but we’re still having an issue getting students to graduate. It’s not because they’re not smart. It’s not because they don’t have the intelligence. It’s because they’re dealing with so much else. You’re working 40 hours a week to help with your finances at your home. Well, it’s hard to be a good student when you are trying to support your family. Our students are struggling with their basic needs: housing, food.

Opportunity House opened last September. What does it mean for students to live there?
We guarantee housing for two years. The students pay $300 a month. In addition to providing housing, we partner with a restaurant in LA called Everytable to provide two meals daily to students who need them. We provide a comprehensive set of support services that include tutoring and academic coaching and workshops on financial literacy.

We offer mental health and wellness services to make sure our students are grounded and that we create a culture of wellness and self-care, emphasizing the importance of therapy and mental health. We also have job readiness and career development, mentoring and leadership development, workshops for our students that talk about life skills—how to become a leader in your own personal life.

It’s not just about housing for us. It’s about how can we set them up for success—inside the classroom, in the marketplace, in their personal lives, in their community.

How are you getting the word out to students in need?
We partner with the colleges and universities across LA, and so we’ll tap into the state’s Educational Opportunity Program. We’ll tap into the Guardian Scholars Program, which is designed to support current and former foster youth in college. We’ll say, “Hey, if you learn about a student who is experiencing homelessness, let us be a resource.” We talked to UCLA. We talked to a couple of local and nearby community colleges. Somehow the word got out: We ended up having 300, almost 400, people apply for 53 spots.

Are there other housing solutions your nonprofit is exploring?
We’re not advocating for the construction of new buildings per se; we’re trying solidly to maximize the space that already exists. There are empty spaces like the Opportunity House or our forthcoming Pasadena location, but are there empty dorm rooms that can be used? How do we partner with colleges and universities to reimagine the use of those spaces, where we buy the spaces as a nonprofit, and then place students who need housing in those spaces. We’re looking for all the open spaces that we can find.

Before the pandemic, one in five community college students were experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness. Since the pandemic, nearly three in five are experiencing housing insecurity, so there is just a tremendous amount of need.

So, what’s the big picture?
Student hunger and homelessness are real, and if we don’t act now, lives and dreams will be cut short. California is projected to have a deficit of 1 million college-educated workers by 2030. All of us are going to feel that pain. If we can’t get folks to work, and if we have a workforce that is short a million folks, then all of us are going to have to deal with the impact of that.

Also, if you look at homelessness as a pipeline issue, what we’re doing is prevention. This is the work that helps folks before things get worse. It would be awesome if we had Manhattan Room & Board or Brooklyn Room & Board or New York City Room & Board—anywhere. We can do this work anyplace because the need is everywhere.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

It begins in February 2008 with her then-19-year-old son, J.P. Vericker, being handcuffed by police outside their suburban New York home, high on drugs and ensnared in an addiction that made him desperate and sometimes violent. His hand was broken from punching a wall in a rage the day before.

It was not the first time the police had responded to the Verickers’ home because of trouble with their son. As officers restrained J.P. by holding him against the side of the house, an officer gently posed a question. The police department would keep responding as needed, of course, but “at some point, you have got to do something.”

“We have enough on him to arrest him,” the officer said. “What do you want to do?”

And, just like that, the Verickers were face-to-face with a decision they had seen coming but deeply hoped to avoid.

Nancy recounts this story in Unchained: Our Family’s Addiction Mess is Our Message (Clear Faith Publishing, 2018), which she co-authored with J.P., now eight years sober. It relates not only the course of J.P.’s addiction but also its impact on his family, and the spirituality that was a lifeline for both Nancy and her son. “I really did, honestly, feel this sense of calling” in co-authoring the book, says Nancy, a spiritual director and youth minister and a 2009 alumna of Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

In it, she charts her journey to accepting a seeming paradox, one that ran against her every instinct as a parent. To help J.P., she had to stop trying to rescue him. As she puts it in the book, “You must surrender to win. You must let go to get your loved one back.”

“My Manzo”

The second-oldest of the Verickers’ four children, J.P. wanted for nothing when he was growing up in their tight-knit family. He was a charming, kind, energetic child known to his mother as her little man, “my Manzo.” When the Verickers brought their adopted daughter, 2-year-old Grace, from China to their Westchester County home, J.P. was the first to quell her tears and make her laugh.

Things changed in eighth grade. He struggled in school and felt listless and depressed, and fell in with a partying crowd during his first year of high school. By sophomore year, he was drinking and smoking pot daily. He grew belligerent, cutting class and staying out past his curfew and getting into trouble with the police.

His parents saw a series of counselors and psychiatrists, looking for answers. They unsuccessfully tried to help J.P. by sending him to a wilderness program and a boarding school. Then, in senior year, he dropped out of their local public high school and started using cocaine and Xanax, sometimes together, a toxic combination that put him in a “manic state,” as he puts it. Mixing a stimulant and sedative, he writes, “can easily kill you.”

Family life moved forward in other ways—the Verickers’ eldest daughter, Annie, was in college and enjoying it; their next-youngest daughter, Molly, was a high-school freshman, making friends and playing field hockey; and Grace was doing well in her new elementary school.

But Nancy’s life was mostly consumed with J.P.’s addiction. Grappling with insomnia and worry, she realized he was stealing from her to pay for drugs. Bitter confrontations ensued, and in February 2008, in a rage, J.P. accosted his parents at home because of money he thought he was owed.

At the end of their rope, Nancy and Joe Vericker moved forward with the option they had been dreading, the one they had warned their son about: They decided to press charges of harassment. As Nancy stood by, distraught, Joe quietly gave permission to one of the officers who had responded to their home: “You can arrest our son.”

Tough Love

In order for J.P. to overcome his addiction, he had to suffer its consequences, she and her husband were told by the treatment professionals they consulted. He had to hit bottom, and they had to let him, counter to their every parental instinct. In addition to letting him be arrested, they had to refrain from rescue efforts like providing shelter and meeting his expenses as he continued to use.

After J.P. was arrested, his parents got a court order of protection and told him to stay away from the family’s home unless he agreed to seek treatment. Viewing it as a vacation, J.P. agreed to go to a treatment center in south Florida, chosen by his parents because of the wealth of post-treatment options in that area.

His story entered a new phase: detoxifications, relapses, halfway houses, flophouses, and homelessness. He struggled toward the realization that he needed help. Today, he has a clear view of his warped thinking from that time.

“Being addicted is like having rabies,” he writes in Unchained, which includes first-person accounts by both him and his mother. “To me, in my addicted mind, my life was normal,” and others were to blame for the strife and altercations in his life.

In lucid moments, he felt a deep yearning to stop using. During a brief trip home from Florida, he broke down in tears for two hours, “flooded with both anger and sadness,” he writes. “I was starting to realize I could not stop on my own.”

Nancy, meanwhile, alternated between hope when he seemed to be recovering and anguish, tears, and sleepless nights when he relapsed. She often didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

And yet, life went on. Family responsibilities beckoned. She gained solace and strength from family, friends, and community, but also from her degree program at Fordham.

Ignatian Lessons

A former journalist, Nancy Vericker first enrolled at Fordham at the suggestion of her spiritual director during a time when she was tending to the children at home, doing occasional volunteer work, and spiritually searching. She spent more than a decade earning a master’s degree, and the studies would help pull her through difficult times—in part, because of the Ignatian teachings in the curriculum.

“There was this thing that was oppressively suffocating the life out of me and my family, and Ignatian spirituality helped me push back,” she says.

In keeping with the Ignatian view of the soul as a battleground, she fought against feelings of desolation—depression, fear, anxiety—by finding consolation in the joys of family life and moments of grace, holding on to those as a way of building generosity of heart and fueling hope.

“Ignatian spirituality saved me in many ways,” she says.

What also helped her were the relationships built up during the program. When J.P. was homeless, she considered quitting, but she persisted with encouragement from a classmate, Mark Mossa, S.J., who went on to become campus ministry director at Spring Hill College in Alabama.

And she became close to Janet Ruffing, R.S.M., then head of the spiritual direction program. When graduation day came for Nancy, she decided to instead go to her daughter Grace’s First Communion, which fell on the same day.

“I knew how torn she was, having made that choice,” says Sister Ruffing, now a professor at Yale Divinity School. “She was consistently making those kinds of choices for her family.”

So Sister Ruffing drove to the Verickers’ home and brought her the degree, entering the house in the midst of a post-Communion party. “They all screamed,” she says with a laugh. “I just felt she deserved to get her degree on graduation day.”

It was a powerful gesture, Nancy says, because she was in despair at the time. She had her doubts that J.P. would survive.

Refusing him help was painful. During one Christmas season, J.P. was calling home over and over from Florida, saying he was homeless and hungry, asking for money. “You cannot under any circumstances send him money,” J.P.’s treatment program director said. He told the story of a woman who, faced with a similar plea, wired money to her addict son, who then spent it on drugs and died of an overdose.

The Verickers kept saying “no,” even on Christmas Day, a few days after J.P.’s 21st birthday. “We will help you when you are ready to get help for your addiction,” Joe Vericker told J.P. on the phone. “We love you, remember that.”

Recovery

J.P.’s recovery began in a low moment, just after he had been jailed in Florida. “I was fearful for my life if I went on using,” he writes. He surrendered his false pride, his sense that “I knew all the answers,” and reentered treatment and joined a 12-step program.

For many addicts, he says, recovery is like dragging rocks in the beginning because they’re physically wrecked, their lives are in ruins, and drugs offer instant relief from the physical agonies of withdrawal. “Their mind is under the impression that they need [drugs]to survive,” he says.

He overcame these obstacles through meditation, help from a support network, and prayer—a crucial defense in the moments when his addiction was banging at the door.

“It was like alarms were going off,” he says. “I was scared that I was going to be, like, possessed and just pick up drugs and use them, because it felt like what had happened sometimes.” He would instantly stop and pray, over and over, “God, please remove the obsession.”

The stark choice he faced in those days has stayed with him. Any passing temptations to accept a drink are quickly quashed by one simple thought: “I don’t want to die.”

The spirituality of his Catholic upbringing helped him stay centered and clean as he earned a GED diploma and a bachelor’s degree in addiction studies, and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. In his mother, he had someone who could relate to his struggle; nearly three decades ago, she had to overcome her own addiction to alcohol.

“The twelve steps are a bond I love having with my son,” she writes. She and J.P. don’t act as each other’s sponsor, the person who “takes you through the steps and offers guidance based on their own experience, strength, and hope in the program.” But they do “share a love of the fellowship,” she says, “and we can give each other advice—as a mother and son would to each other.”

Today, as a board-certified substance abuse counselor and co-founder of the outpatient Northeast Addictions Treatment Center in Quincy, Massachusetts, J.P. spends his days overseeing the center’s operation and counseling people addicted to opioids that are far more deadly than the drugs he was using. And, since the publication of Unchained, he has joined his mother in spreading the book’s message of hope and recovery and trying to reduce the stigma addicts face.

They shared that message on NBC’s Today show and on the SiriuxXM radio/television show Conversation with Cardinal Dolan, among other programs. Their story has spread through word-of-mouth, and some mothers have contacted her to say “I felt like I was reading my own story,” Nancy says.

“I get up every morning and try to think of ways to get this story out there. It’s just to let people know that help is available. I will answer every email, we’ll talk on the phone, I’ll call people back,” she says, “because I feel like this is part of what I’m supposed to be doing with my life right now.”