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St. Vincent de Paul kicks off food drive
By J.D. Long-García, The Catholic Sun
November 15, 2007
Two by two, members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul visit the homes of people in need, bringing food, prayers and financial help.
Society members, or Vincentians, bring food collected by their conferences, usually based at local parishes. Each November, the men’s club at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Scottsdale organizes a diocese-wide food drive to collect goods from more than 80 conference affiliates.
“In the end, we only have a certain amount of food. So this food drive really helps,” said Brian O’Donnell, president of the St. Vincent de Paul conference at the Scottsdale parish. “If we have more food, we have more funds for other things.”
Each year volunteers hand out some 60,000 grocery bags at parishes throughout the diocese. Parishioners fill nearly half the bags with non-perishable foods to stock local food pantries and return them a week before Thanksgiving.
“We emphasize visiting people in their homes so that we can get a real sense of what they really need,” said Steve Jenkins, president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Diocesan Council in Phoenix.
“You might visit a person and find out their lights are out or that they don’t have furniture,” he added. “Sometimes you just pray for a person to help them get over something.”
Jenkins once visited a mother of three who had two broken teeth and a husband in jail.
“We gave her food, referred her to a dental clinic and helped her with her rent,” he said. “When a family faces eviction from a house it’s terrifying.”
Jenkins and O’Donnell joined other society members at an Oct. 27 Mass that kicked off the drive. Members from the 84 conferences in the Phoenix Diocese joined Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, Fr. William John Fitzgerald of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and Fr. Pedro Velez of St. Daniel the Prophet Parish in Scottsdale for the Mass at the downtown Phoenix St. Vincent de Paul dining room.
“No one knows more about the grass roots than you,” Fr. Fitzgerald said in his homily. “For you indeed are the frontline of our Church’s mission to speak and act for the poor.”
Fr. Fitzgerald said that fighting poverty requires society to deal with its root causes and compared the poor to the unborn.
“The poverty stricken are in many ways like the baby in the womb who cannot speak for himself but needs others to address the systematic causes —such as dire poverty — that facilitate abortion,” he said.
“We as Vincentians must be unrelenting in our pursuit of a voice for the poor,” Fr. Fitzgerald said, “in a culture where their voices are lost in a flood of angry words.”
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