Rosie’s Place founder Kip Tiernan dies at 85

“Every day of her life she lived for social justice, and the lives she saved were untold,’’ Mayor Thomas M. Menino said. “She always said that someday we will stamp out homelessness, but until that day we have to make sure everyone understands that a homeless person could be one of us. She was a very special person, and there’s a big hole in our lives today because Kip’s not here. This nation is going to miss Kip Tiernan because of her fight for social justice.’’

Along with Fran Froehlich, her partner in advocacy for more than 35 years, Ms. Tiernan founded, helped found, or was a founding member of a number of agencies and panels, including Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Boston Food Bank, Community Works, Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Finex House, Food for Free, John Leary House, My Sister’s Place, Transition House, the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

The range of suffering was such that “sometimes you think there aren’t any tears left,’’ Ms. Tiernan told the Globe in 1988, “and you find yourself sobbing.’’

Strong words were her response more often than tears, however. Drawn by faith to her calling, she brought unconditional love to each encounter with the homeless, and she didn’t hesitate to criticize the powerful if they backed what she believed were unfair policies or tried to slide by with words of pity.

The cross she wore was more than a symbol.

“A rooted woman, Kip always wears that cross,’’ Globe op-ed columnist James Carroll wrote in 1996, “which marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, ‘an angry daughter of Christ… . I find that the cross of Jesus is the radical condemnation of an unjust world. You have to stay with the one crucified or stand with the crucifiers.’ ’’