Category: Church

The Catholic Church in Cambodia.

Here and There, Then and Now

After 42 years in Asia, I returned home to Kentucky. But it isn’t the home I left. Things I saw THEN are different NOW. Life HERE is different from life THERE. Here is another sample of the differences.

THERE
I had really good friends in Cambodia, even though for the group above I was their boss. They went out of their way to get together with me for lunch when I visited Phnom Penh in April.
HERE
Today I had lunch with a group of guys who were with me at St. Thomas Seminary in Louisville in the early 1960s. Some of them I didn’t know so well because they were three, four, five years ahead of me. But we all shared the common experience of a minor seminary pre-Vatican II. That created an enduring bond that brought us together 65+years later. And overlaying that was the common language, the experience of living together away from home for years, a common goal in our youth, and the shared studies, meals, sports, and pillow fights in the dorm. That all makes these friendships significantly different from those of Cambodia.

SVDP in Louisville

More than food distribution

The operations of the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Louisville are quite extensive. Before, I showed photos of the twice-weekly food distribution. There is more.

This is the old St. Paul Church building. Now it is a dining room for the meals served to the poor and homeless.
The building’s origins are obvious. In addition to the stained glass windows, the old altar and tabernacle are still present at the front of the dining room. Lunch and dinner are served to about 290 persons every day, seven days a week. Above, volunteers are preparing to serve a lunch.
The building on the left (where the man is seated) is the old St. Paul school. Next to it is the former rectory where the priests lived. And on the far right is one of five or six residential buildings. The SVDP compound now covers an entire city block.
Two more residential buildings for the homeless. Some of them are for homeless veterans or single mothers with children or people with disabilities.
Another residence for the poor and homeless.

SVDP in Louisville

Last October, when I was in California visiting Jim and Roberta McLaughlin, returned Maryknoll Lay Missioners who had worked with me in Cambodia, Jim introduced me to the workings of the St. Vincent de Paul Society food pantry in their home parish of St. Columba. I learned a lot in my time at St. Columba.

Today I had the opportunity to visit a comparable SVDP operation in Louisville at the invitation of Ken and Diane Golliher who volunteer there. And again I learned a lot.

I was surprised to learn that while I was in Cambodia, the archdiocese had made a closed downtown parish campus available to the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Open Hand Kitchen.
The Louisville SVDP food pantry distributes food on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some of the food comes from businesses and food services in the area. Here a group of volunteers unloads a van of donated food.
The food is first placed on shelves or in a refrigerator or freezer until it is bagged for distribution.
Some food is donated by USDA (Department of Agriculture).
Recipients of the food distribution come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and receive two bags, one of food from USDA and another from the private sources. In addition to the food, detergents, personal care items, and other necessities are available. Approximately 130 individuals and families are served each distribution day.

Care for Creation

Laudato Si’ challenges us to “hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” through ecological conversion, changes in lifestyle and society, and strong political action. What are Catholic Christians to do? Here are some suggestions:

4. DISCERN what you can do to change your own way of living to one that is more sustainable for the whole community. This includes reducing water usage, reducing use of plastics and eliminating Styrofoam, switching to LED lighting, planting trees and native plants, and by becoming an eco-consumer doing eco-investing.

Public Man-Made Death

In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, historian Richard Rhodes spoke about a certain kind of dying: “the deaths caused not by microbe or misfortune but by policy—by war, by neglect, by privation deliberately imposed.  Artificially induced famine. The willful dismantling of the infrastructure that keeps the poor alive. Rhodes gave the thing a name. He called it public man-made death….”

Two reports were quoted. One in The Lancet said: “… in the single year since USAID was destroyed, on the order of seven hundred thousand human beings have already died who would otherwise be alive. The Lancet study calculated that the agency had saved some ninety-two million lives over the previous two decades.”

From a commentary by Msgr. Arthur Halquin.

Care for Creation

Laudato Si’ challenges us to “hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” through ecological conversion, changes in lifestyle and society, and strong political action. What are Catholic Christians to do? Here are some suggestions: 

  1. USE YOUR HEARING AND SIGHT to respond to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. They are interconnected. The poor have been unjustly subjected to the results of abuses on nature brought by wealthy nations.

Care for Creation

Laudato Si’ challenges us to “hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” through ecological conversion, changes in lifestyle and society, and strong political action. What are Catholic Christians to do? Here are some suggestions:

2. LEARN by reading Laudato Si’ for free at:    http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html