Where it’s OK to eat corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day this Lent

Chicago, Ill., Mar 26, 2020 / 03:38 pm (CNA).- As homeless shelters have been limited by the coronavirus, the Clerics of Saint Viator will help fund an initiative to house homeless people amid the pandemic.

The religious order based in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb, has donated $63,000 to help over 60 homeless people stay at two hotels in the city. The initiative will last for at least three weeks, but it will likely be extended.

The religious order partnered with Journeys: The Road Home in Palatine to help homeless people have a place to quarantine during this pandemic. As of March 25, over 1,800 cases of the coronavirus have occurred in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported.

As the organization has also received donations from numerous other religious organizations in the area, the hotels were able to house 81 people last night with 10 more clients who will be checked-in today.

Suzanne Ploger, Journey’s director of development, told CNA that it is essential to help homeless people protect themselves from the virus as they are unable to self-quarantine.

Not only has the pandemic caused public facilities and businesses to close, but it has closed homeless shelters. Because of the pandemic, the organization’s services and volunteers have been limited. She said a majority of the volunteers for the homeless ministry are elderly people, who also need to be kept safe from the outbreak.

Experts are urging people to “ stay indoors, and then all the restaurants are closing and all the public facilities are closing,” she said.

“If you don’t have a home to shelter in place, where are you supposed to be? That’s where we were struggling with how we can provide the best services to our clients and keep them safe as well as be able to keep our staff and our volunteers healthy too.”

She said the clients have been chosen by those who are most at risk of COVID-19. She said the organization has prioritized 100 people who normally use their shelters and ranked them in terms of those with advanced age, families, or health issues.

“As we have secured the hotel room and we have secured the amount of funding to house that person in that hotel room for three weeks, then we house them and then we’d go down to the next rank on the list,” she said.

The organization will also help feed the clients in the hotel with a meal delivery system.

“We’re packing up food pantry bags, we’re packing up meals, some people are donating food again, and we’re starting that system of delivering meals to the hotels. Right now we’re doing it almost every day,” she said.

The Journey is a homeless service agency that partners with 21 religious organizations that provide emergency shelter. It began 30 years ago and, under normal circumstances, will house about 100 homeless people each night.

Besides the hotel, the organization will keep open a limited number of services including a food pantry, clothing closet, mail services, and emergency case management.

Father Daniel Hall, the provincial superior for the Viatorians, said, without living assistance, this pandemic may cause dozens of homeless people to get sick. He said this project should be important to Catholics and encouraged parishioners to donate.

“This is in line with our mission as a Catholic religious community,” said Hall, according to the Daily Herald. “This crisis could lead to between 60 to 80 men, women and children on the verge of living on the streets, and even more vulnerable to the coronavirus.”

“It is my hope that you join us in this commitment to care for our most vulnerable sisters and brothers during this crisis.”

[…]

Denver, Colo., Feb 2, 2018 / 05:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In Lincoln, Nebraska, you can tell the seasons by the habits of the School Sisters of Christ the King.

It’s not really summer until you spot a “CK Sister”, as they are affectionately known, walking around in her lighter blue summer habit.

But when a CK sister is donning her dark blue habit, that means the months are turning colder. And when the dark blue habits come out, you can find almost every CK sister in a classroom, teaching in one of the 27 Catholic elementary schools in the diocese.

Religious school sisters are a fairly common sight in the Diocese of Lincoln, which has two diocesan orders of women religious – the Christ the King Sisters as well as the grey-habited Marian sisters, many of whom can also be found teaching in the local Catholic schools.

In much of the rest of the country, however, religious sisters are something of a rare novelty – though they used to be a much more common sight in the United States.

In 1965, there were nearly 180,000 women religious in the United States, many of them school teachers, according to data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate out of Georgetown University.

By 2014, there were less than 50,000 religious sisters, the numbers having steadily declined over the past half-century in the post-Vatican II upheaval that was felt in many parts of the Church around the world.

It was in the midst of this upheaval and decline that Bishop Glennon Patrick Flavin, then of Lincoln, decided to found the Christ the King Sisters as a religious order dedicated specifically to teaching children.

“He noticed that there were a good number of sisters in our schools in the 50’s and 60’s, but by the 70’s the sisters were starting to pull out of our classrooms,” Sr. Mary Cecilia, a Christ the King Sister, told CNA.

Bishop Flavin had difficulty finding already-established religious orders that were able to come to the Diocese of Lincoln, and eventually felt called to found a diocesan order dedicated specifically to teaching, Sr. Mary Cecilia said.

“He knew that our seminaries were growing and increasing in number, and he thought if the Lord was calling this many young men to serve as priests then he was probably calling young women to serve as sisters also,” she said.

Sr. Mary Cecilia, who now serves as principal of St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Lincoln, said that Bishop Flavin founded the order with the idea that a good religious education would strengthen the faith of much of the laity in the diocese.

“He wanted to extend Christ’s reign in whatever place possible…and he realized what was so important to make that happen was Catholic education. Because if we can reach the young people in the diocese, we not only reach the young people but we also reach their parents and families,” she said.

“He realized that one of the best ways to really nurture their faith in the lives of these children is through the consecrated life, through having sisters present in the schools, the value of the witness of a religious – their life totally dedicated to God, their gift of self-sacrifice, being a spiritual mother to every single student in the school,” she added.

For herself, Sr. Mary Cecilia said she knew from a young age she wanted to teach.

“I have a brother who’s a priest – he often talks about how I used to play school so everything he knows about teaching came from me when he was little,” she joked.

In college in the early 1990s, she studied high school math education and dreamed of teaching calculus and algebra to older students. But that’s also when she met the Christ the King Sisters, who only teach at the elementary level.

“I realized oh they’re joyful, they’re young, vibrant, I like that,” Sr. Mary Cecilia said.

Even though she was drawn to religious life as a CK Sister, she was still hesitant about teaching at the younger level – “that was something that I had to take to the Lord,” she said.

Ultimately, though, the spirit of the CK Sisters, their depth of prayer, their warmth, and their dedication to education were what drew Sr. Mary Cecilia to them.

“We are extending the kingdom of God in Catholic schools, and Catholic schools are so important to me primarily because of my own education in Catholic schools,” she said.

Sr. Mary Agnes belongs to another religious order, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Wichita, Kansas, that is also primarily dedicated to the education and formation of young people.

A veteran teacher of 10 years, Sr. Mary Agnes said she believes that religious sisters bring something unique to the classroom that other teachers cannot, even though at a basic level, they perform the same functions.

“Our vocation is to be a more radical, vivid sign of the presence of Christ in the world, and then hopefully through that witness draw people to an encounter with Christ,” she told CNA.

“We do really similar things that other people do who are not sisters,” she said. “So (the value of) religious life is not about doing, it’s about witness and the being of the person. Our vocation is to be a more radical, vivid sign of the presence of Christ in the world, and then hopefully through that witness draw people to an encounter with Christ.”

Perhaps some of the most well-recognized teaching sisters in the Catholic Church in the U.S. today are the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia based in Nashville, Tennessee and the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Both orders, primarily dedicated to education, have sisters teaching on Catholic campuses throughout the country.

“We belong to the Dominican Order and our charism is preaching and teaching.
Women religious have been an integral part of the history of Catholic education in the United States,” Sr. John Dominic with the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist told CNA.

“As Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, we seek to continue the tradition of educating generations of young people in their faith and most of all, to bring youth into a deeper relationship with Christ,” she said.

Despite the general decline in religious life that has been happening over the past few decades, both Dominican orders have seen a boom in young vocations in recent years. The Dominican Sisters of Mary recently opened a new priory in Texas in order to accommodate all of the young women discerning religious life in their order.

When asked what is drawing so many young women to their order, Sr. John Dominic responded: “The young people are responding to God’s invitation to ‘come and follow Him’.”

Sr. John Dominic said the depth of the prayer life of the sisters and the close relationship with the Lord that their way of life allows lets them bring the fruits of their spiritual life to their students.

“Pope Saint John Paul II once described women religious as being a ‘sign of tenderness’ in the world. From my experience in working with Sisters in schools, this is precisely what many of them bring – tenderness and an intuitive heart,” she said.

Sr. Mary Agnes said she is always humbled when parents and students recognize the unique gifts and witness that religious sisters bring to the classroom.

“…that to me is the most striking, when the students come back after they graduate and they’re so excited to express: ‘Thank you what you’ve done for me.’ Many times they don’t recognize it at the time but then they do say thank you I’m glad that you taught me, I’m glad you were there for me, and it’s so humbling,” she said.

Sr. Mary Cecilia said that she would encourage young women considering religious life not to be afraid, and to encounter sisters up-close before believing some of the misconceptions about religious sisters that exist.  

“When I was younger I thought that all sisters instantly became like 70 once they put that habit on, and that’s not true!” she said. “None of our sisters are 70 yet.”

On a more serious note, she added, “I think one of the misconceptions out there is that you have to give up everything that you hold dear, that you have dreams of, in order to do this. And in reality you do but it’s not the giving up that you focus on,” she said.

“It’s what takes its place – your relationship with the Lord, and being able to be filled with an intense and immense love for him, and therefore an immense love for the people you’re asked to serve.”

[…]

Unsplash.

Denver Newsroom, Feb 24, 2022 / 14:08 pm (CNA).
Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, on Thursday encouraged the undertaking of prayer and fasting for an end to the Ukraine conflict.Russian m… […]