Steven McDonald doesn’t worry about the skeptics. For the last 21 years in particular, he has had plenty of practice hearing people ask (or simply sensing them wonder) what the hell he hoped to achieve. The doubts don’t faze him. Why he has been spending all his recent Easters at the Lourdes shrine in France is no more difficult to explain than why an extreme handicap has not impeded his prominence in international peace-making initiatives in recent years. “It’s a place where heaven touches earth,” he says with almost casual conviction about the area associated with a Marian apparition to the peasant girl Bernadette in the 19th century. “If you want the feeling of a loving God, Lourdes is where you go.”

Most New Yorkers are familiar with McDonald’s story. On July 12, 1986, the then-28-year-old member of an NYPD anti-robbery unit was assigned to Central Park in response to a series of “wilding” episodes in which roving teenage gangs had been molesting pedestrians, often with vicious consequences. While questioning three teenagers near the lake, he bent down for a better look at what he suspected was a gun in the sock of one of the boys. At that point, 15-year-old Shavod Jones pulled a .22-caliber snub-nosed revolver of his own and fired three times, hitting McDonald in the head, neck and arm. The cop said later that the shooting seemed to take place “in slow motion,” that he smelled each burst of sulfur and felt each of the bullets as it individually entered his body.

Doctors worked frantically to save McDonald’s life at a nearby hospital but could do nothing about a resultant quadriplegia or the constant need of a respirator for survival. Months later, according to McDonald, he overheard one doctor suggest to his pregnant wife Patty Ann that, in view of the permanent paralysis and the need for elaborate nursing care, she might look into “a place to put him away.”

But that was not a solution for either McDonald. Instead, they dealt with the onerous physical and mental costs of the Central Park shooting until Steve gradually realized that the unwanted fame he had gained could be useful. At the most personal level, this meant corresponding with his own assailant, Jones, while the latter was spending eight years behind bars. Asked repeatedly how he could correspond with the youth who had shot him point blank and left him in a wheelchair for life, McDonald always had the same answer: “The only thing worse than a bullet in my spine would have been revenge.”

During their correspondence, McDonald and Jones floated plans for becoming active symbols of forgiveness and non-violence once the teenager was released from prison. Those intentions went by the boards when, a mere three days after his release in 1995, Jones was killed in a motorcycle accident. But McDonald didn’t abandon the larger theme of forgiveness and non-violence and, usually accompanied by Patty Ann, threw himself into an intense schedule of appearances before youth groups up and down the East Coast to warn of the dangers of giving in to violent solutions to problems. The same themes were at the fore when he teamed up with Protestant writer Johann Christoph Arnold on a series of trips to Ulster in an effort to bring an end to the sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the British-ruled area of Ireland. On one occasion, McDonald and Arnold addressed the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont Castle in Belfast, pointing to themselves as examples of how tolerance and non-violence were the only effective long-term redresses for violence.

Without beating anyone over the head about it, McDonald also made it clear that he owed much of his attitude to his own religious upbringing — a spark for the first trip he, his wife and son Conor took to Lourdes some eight years ago. In McDonald’s eyes, the experience at the shrine suggested another opportunity for spreading his own gospel of forgiveness. “There’s such a spirit of pilgrimage and of loving God,” he says, “that you want as many people as possible to benefit from it. For me, over the last few years especially, that has meant kids first of all.”

Steve’s wife Patty and their son Conor, a sophomore at Boston College, see him off at the airport.  Photos by William Baker

On April 14, as Patty McDonald is installed as mayor of Malverne, she poses with other Long Island public officials: (standing, l-r) Malverne Trustee John O’Brien, Deputy Mayor James Callahan, State Assemblyman Bob Barra, Nassau County Legislator Fran Becker, and Malverne Trustees Joseph Hennessy and Michael Bailey; (seated, l-r) Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi and State Senator Dean Skelos.

It has been on that basis that the now-detective lieutenant has been working since the turn of the century with the American Special Children’s Pilgrimage Group in selecting a dozen or so handicapped kids every year around Easter for a one-week visit to the French shrine. The selection process is extremely articulated, with the chosen candidates adjudged by doctors and nurses to be suffering from “mild to moderate” disabilities and having the capacity to travel abroad without parents. The screeners start their work as early as Thanksgiving, dropping in on the homes of victims of such diseases as cerebral palsy and Down’s syndrome to see how they get along in a group setting. Being a Catholic is not a requirement — a fact emphasized by McDonald and spokespeople for the Pilgrimage Group. “If we started off that way,” as one of them put it, “we’d be right back to the sectarianism that causes problems, not solves them. Members of any religion at all are eligible.”

The 2007 party also included the handicapped young family members of two other NYPD officers. One was the younger brother of TARU officer Ralph Jean-Pierre, Jeffrey. The other was Jake Brower, son of John Brower from the property office of the 110 Pct. “In 2004, exactly on Easter weekend, we were pretty sure Jake was going to die,” says Brower. “But he made it, so going on this trip is kind of anniversary of a miracle for me and my wife. And for that we have to thank Steve, the ultimate Christian.”

A significant development in the McDonalds’ already busy lives was Patty’s recent election as mayor of their hometown, the Long Island village of Malverne. Patty, who ran against the incumbent as an independent, had been a member of the village board for the past eight years, succeeding her father, John Norris, after his death. Her father, Patty says, inspired her to get involved in public service. And Steve, she adds, is “happy and supportive” of her political career, calling her “Madam Mayor” around the house.

As for the miracles alleged to have occurred at Lourdes, McDonald is more comfortable talking about the spiritual impact of the place. “For me, Bernadette is the earthly symbol of saying yes to God, and that’s enough reason for wanting to be there. Of course the thousands of people visiting the shrine don’t suddenly get up and throw away their crutches. But I have yet to meet anybody who was there who wasn’t profoundly affected spiritually and emotionally, and isn’t that the starting point for everything? You can’t just dote on your physical problems. The people who do that are handicapping themselves for good.”