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December 7, 2008

How to help yourself ... get to heaven Aiding others in need is the path to salvation, according to Gospel

People who are watching the stock market, the unemployment rate and other economic indicators to assess the state of the economy are finding out what people who work with the poor already know: There are more people who need help, and, apparently, fewer people willing or able to give it.

Volunteers who operate some pantries have reported having to turn people away because they ran out of food, and others say they are cutting down on what they give to each family.

“Our demand is up and our donations are down,” said Christine Dyke-Sorrells, director of the emergency assistance program for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago. “Our food donations are down, our clothing donations are down and our money donations are down.”

Requests up

Requests for emergency assistance rose by a third from the first three months of 2007 to the first three months of 2008, and have continued to rise since then, Dyke-Sorrells said.

Those who are not giving food or money — even if its only a little bit, and even if it’s difficult — are missing out on an opportunity to help themselves, said Father Matt Eyerman, pastor of St. Columbanus Parish.

“It’s in Matthew 25,” said Eyerman in a phone interview just two days after that Scripture was the Sunday Gospel text: “Whatsoever you do for the least of them, you do for me.”

It’s not optional

The Gospel mandate to feed the hungry isn’t optional, Eyerman said. It’s a requirement for salvation.

St. Columbanus, 331 E. 71st St., provided food for 350 families between July and September this year, up from 270 families requesting help during the same months in 2007, Eyerman said.

“Feeding the hungry is not something we do because we’re nice,” he said. “It’s not something we do to get a warm fuzzy feeling. It’s because we want to go to heaven. The question is, do you want to go to the barbecue or be the barbecue? Because that’s the option.”

“The Gospel commands it,” said Benedictine Father Edward Linton, pastor of St. James Parish, 2907 S. Wabash Ave. “Not only does the Gospel command it, but our worship demands it.”

His parishioners understand that, Linton said.

“Even though we are a small church, and there are always financial struggles, no one ever suggests closing the food pantry to cut back,” he said. “I think the parish recognizes that without the food pantry, we would be a different parish.

At St. James Parish, 2,075 families asked for food in October this year, up about 700 from six months earlier.

“It’s almost like it’s happened overnight, an explosion,” said Linton.

St. James might see more people coming because it has a reputation of providing well-balanced, nutritious food packages, including some intended specifically for homeless people who have no place to cook, and it is open three days every week, Linton said.

Strong relationships with sharing parishes allow the pantry to request donations of certain kinds of items — say, peanut butter or tuna, which are high in protein and don’t need to be cooked — or to distribute shopping bags with attached lists of needed items, Linton said.

Need for cash

But what the pantry needs most is cash, he said, to pay workers and to purchase items that are not donated. Even food from the Greater Chicago Food Depository must be purchased, he pointed out, although it comes at greatly reduced rates.

The pantry next year will lose a grant from the Kraft Foods employees’ fund, which provided $110,000 over the last three years to provide food for Asian-Americans from nearby Chinatown, for senior citizens and for homeless people.

Catholic Charities, St. James and St. Columbanus are not alone.

Overall, Cook County food pantries reported a 33 percent increase in demand for help this year, according to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the regional food bank that distributes donated and purchased food through a network of 600 member food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters.

The need is not limited to the City of Chicago. Mary Beth Hartmann, Catholic Charities’ regional representative for the North/Northwest suburbs, said the food pantry at the regional center in Des Plaines served about 2,500 families in October, and the number is rising.

It’s up almost 40 percent from last year. They include senior citizens on fixed incomes, the recently unemployed, the working poor and homeless people who spend their time in the forest preserves near the center.

“A lot of people just don’t have the income they need,” Hartmann said.

So far, the pantry has not had to turn people away, but there have been days when the shelves were nearly bare before a parish or school made a big delivery. “When you talk about God’s love working in the world, this is one situation where you see that people really do care about their neighbors,” she said.

Finding hope

She remembers particularly the sixth-grade class at Sacred Heart School in Winnetka whom she spoke to. They planned to do a food drive in their class, expanded it to the whole school and far exceeded their goal of 1,000 items.

There are also the religious education students from Mary Seat of Wisdom Parish in Park Ridge who trick-or-treated for the food pantry this year. And the developmentally disabled men and women at the Center for Enriched Living in Glenview who held their own food drive.

“I know it sounds corny, but when the cupboards are bare, some individual or parish or corporation pops up with a donation,” she said.

For the moment, the food pantry at St. Columbanus is able to meet the rising demand because people generally are mindful of the needy during the holiday season, Eyerman said.

“Ask me again in July when we’re scraping the floor,” he said. “People are hungry two days before Thanksgiving and two days before the Fourth of July.”

Not all food pantries have been so fortunate, said Janice Hayden, the district president for St. Vincent de Paul conferences in an area on the South and Southwest Sides. The pantry at her parish, St. Turibius, has run out of food, as have pantries at Our Lady of Fatima and St. Clare de Montefalco, a parish in a poorer neighborhood where many of the Vincentians themselves are clients.

St. Clare, whose food pantry is open once a week, served more than 3,000 people the first two weeks of November. On Nov. 22, 4,436 people at St. Clare were served either a hot dinner, bags of food to take home or both, she said.

The St. Vincent de Paul Conference there is getting help to serve its community from conferences throughout the Chicago area.

Turning people away

She worries about the people who ask for help that is not there — “Imagine having to put your kids to bed hungry. It’s horrible.” — and the volunteers that have to turn them away — “They want to help. How long will they be able to say ‘No, we have nothing for you’?”

The Vincentians practice a spirituality of putting their faith in action, specifically by reaching out to help poor people on a personal level.

“We believe in touching the poor and those in need, we see Jesus in them, and hopefully they see Jesus in us,” she said. “We are Jesus’ hands on this earth.”

To help, Hayden said, Catholics can get involved in their own parishes and find out where the nearest food pantry is, then find out what they need.

“Even if someone can’t pack or deliver food, maybe they can send out letters asking for donations,” she said.