News Briefs

Washington D.C., Sep 16, 2018 / 07:00 am (CNA).- Northeast Washington, D.C., has seen rapid gentrification over the past decade. What was once a very poor neighborhood is now home to many high-end businesses, including a Whole Foods Market–and an innovative food pantry inspired in part by the upscale grocery store.

While the Whole Foods Market is open seven days a week, the “Holy Foods Market,” run by the Holy Name of Jesus Parish, located on K Street NE, is open twice a month.

Instead of a traditional food pantry, where those in need would receive a bag of food, clients who visit the Holy Foods Market are able to “shop” through the shelves and pick out what food items they would like.

The pastor at Holy Name of Jesus, Fr. Bill Carloni, said that he wanted to replicate the experience he had visiting Whole Foods in his parish’s food pantry. The idea grew into Holy Foods Market, which began operations in May, a little more than a year after the Whole Foods opened down the street. 

The pantry serves about 80 to 100 families a month, Carloni told CNA in an interview. Unlike many food pantries, few of the clients at Holy Foods Market are homeless. Most of the people served by the Market retirees, single parents, or the elderly. Each client is paired with a volunteer who assists them with the process of “shopping” for food.

Clients choose for themselves how much or how little food they need, within a certain limit. No one is required to take any particular food item, and some “customers” may only want certain things like milk, cereal, or peanut butter, Carloni said.

The setup of Holy Foods Market helps to preserve the clients’ dignity, the pastor told CNA. The pantry does not verify the income of its clients, though it does request that they either live within the approximate geographic boundary of the parish, or else have some sort of interaction with the church, either spiritually or as a volunteer.

“I’ve had feedback from a person, who said, ‘You know, I’m so thankful that you treat me like a human being,’” said Carloni.

“I think that often they say ‘beggars can’t be choosers,’ but that’s the whole point. We don’t want people to feel like beggars, and I think this does help humanize what we do. It does make them feel like they’re shopping.”

Allowing people to choose their own food items also has other benefits, Carloni explained to CNA. Because clients only pick items they actually want, no donated food is wasted.

The system also allows the Market to better accommodate clients with special diets or food allergies.

The previous system of distributing pre-packed bags of food resulted in many items going to waste, said Carloni, noting that cans of food were often found discarded outside of the pantry.

“There was one person who said specifically that she used to come, every month, to get food. But then when she would get home, she would empty the bag and she would keep about half the contents and then she would re-donate the other half back to the pantry, ” said Carloni.

“So she was trying not to waste it, actually, but what would end up happening is that she’d get the same stuff back the next month.”

Caroni told CNA that he believes sometimes people can approach ministries like a food pantry with a  “wrong mentality” and that those who are less fortunate “should be grateful and they should just take whatever they get.”

Fr. Carloni said that for many of the clients at the Market, it is extremely humbling to have to ask for a handout or for food assistance, and they strive to make the process of “shopping” as dignified and “customer oriented” as possible.

“I think a lot of people at one point or another have been in need of charity. Receiving love shouldn’t come at the cost of your dignity.”

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New York City, N.Y., Sep 15, 2018 / 06:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Catholic Charities in New York has received a nearly $1 million grant to provide care to opioid addicts in rural counties in the southern part of the state.  

This year the Catholic… […]

New York City, N.Y., Sep 14, 2018 / 11:40 am (CNA).- Cardinal Timothy Dolan has spoken about how the extended sexual abuse scandals facing the Church have taken a personal toll on him. The Archbishop of New York said that his own mother is “embarrassed to be Catholic.”

Dolan made the comments to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in a Sept. 13 interview. He said that his mother, who lives in an assisted-living home, told him that people knew her son was a priest and that she was ashamed of the scandals. 

“If you don’t think that’s wrenching, I tell you, it’s awful. This summer has been anything but a church picnic for us. It’s been a disaster–one crisis after another,” he said.

Dolan also said that, while scandals involving sexual abuse among the clergy were “not new,” he had listened to many survivors face-to-face throughout the years and that the damage done to them and to the Church was terrible.

The cardinal explained that when people came to him in anger and frustration about the revelations he told them how he shares their pain and outrage. Dolan also expressed his anger at how his fellow bishops could be “so negligent” in failing to properly respond to allegations of abuse.

Despite this anger at members of the Church hierarchy for mishandling or ignoring abuse claims, Dolan gave a strong vote of personal support to Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C.

Dolan said that Wuerl had a strong record as a reformer who has taken tough action against clerical abuse.

Cardinal Wuerl has faced numerous calls for his resignation in the fallout of the revelations concerning his predecessor, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, and a Pennsylvania grand jury report on allegations of sexual abuse in several dioceses in that state.

“I’ve got to be personal,” Dolan said of Wuerl, “he’s a good friend and he’s a tremendous leader. I kind of hope he doesn’t resign. We need him. He’s been a great source of reform in the past.”

Dolan did, however, say that he would “trust” Wuerl’s decision if he felt it was necessary to resign.

Wuerl, the former bishop of Pittsburgh, was named over 200 times in the Pennsylvania grand jury report. In addition to persistent questions about his knowledge of the accusations against McCarrick, he has faced criticism for his handling of some cases involving accused priests during his time in Pittsburgh.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Cardinal Wuerl submitted his resignation to Pope Francis following his 75th birthday three years ago, as is required by canon law. By not accepting the resignation, Pope Francis has allowed him to continue in office past the normal retirement age.

While it was widely thought that Wuerl hoped to continue in post at least until the U. S. Bishops’ conference met for their general session in November, an Archdiocese of Washington spokesman recently confirmed to CNA that he plans to travel to Rome “soon” to request that the pope accept his resignation.

As Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Dolan was responsible for overseeing the preliminary investigation into allegations that Archbishop Theodore McCarrick groped a 16 year old boy in 1971. McCarrick was serving as a priest in the Archdiocese of New York at that time.

That investigation, which began in 2017, determined the accusation to be credible and forwarded the charge to authorities in Rome. The public disclosure of that finding in June 2018 triggered a succession of public accusations that McCarrick had sexually assaulted or abused seminarians and priests over a period of decades, as well as a further accusation that he had sexually abused a minor.

Since then, numerous bishops in the United States and Rome have faced questions about when accusations against McCarrick had first been made known to Church authorities, and how he had been allowed to continue in ministry despite widespread rumors of his misconduct.

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