MADISON — On June 4 of this year, volunteers with Pro Labore Dei (PLD)-Madison chapter served their 100,000th meal to homeless people in downtown Madison. As of September 17, the number of meals served passed 103,000, according to Jim Flad, local PLD coordinator.
“In this Year of Mercy, we are grateful and thankful to God for choosing us to be His hands and legs here in Madison,” said Flad.
MADISON — Bethel Lutheran Church and Catholic Charities Madison have announced a new partnership to support the homeless through a joint operation of the Winter Day Resource Center, expanding services from two days to five, at 312 Wisconsin Ave., in downtown Madison.
The Church Council at Bethel Lutheran Church, with the Board of Directors at Catholic Charities, voted in favor of operating the Winter Day Resource Center as partners, which will allow expansion from the current Tuesday and Thursday, to Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Nov. 1 through March 31, 2017.
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| Chef Fr. Leo Patalinghug displays a Lenten seafood pasta meal he prepared in his Baltimore kitchen recently. The priest has started an apostolate, “Grace Before Meals,” which aims to bring families to the dinner table and bring God to the table. (CNS photo/Chaz Muth) |
BALTIMORE (CNS) — For Fr. Leo Patalinghug, faith and food go hand in hand, or in cooking terms, they blend; there is no trick to folding one into the other.
“The idea of food in faith is implicit in our Scriptures. It’s implicit in our liturgical calendar,” he said, also adding that without question it’s a key component of the Mass.
The 45-year-old Filipino-American, known as the cooking priest, has made the blending of those two worlds his life’s work with his apostolate, “Grace Before Meals,” which aims, as he puts it: “to bring families to the dinner table and bring God to the table.”
He not only does a cooking show on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) called Savoring our Faith, but he also travels across the country giving parish workshops and speaks at conferences, on radio programs, and via social media about the need for families to celebrate not just Catholic feast days but everyday meals together.
He also has written three books and is currently working on two more.
Without irony, he says there is a hunger for this ministry, noting that the parish workshops he gives are typically booked, filled with parishioners of all ages interested in how food and faith meet and on connecting or reconnecting with each other and God.
When Catholic News Service met Father Patalinghug at his Baltimore home February 24, he had just returned from a series of parish missions in California and Chicago and was about to leave the next day for the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress.
Oh, and he also was having about 30 family members over that night for dinner, so he needed to get meat in the oven and a pasta dish started.
SAUK CITY — How many people can you feed with a semi-truck full of food? The answer to that question is more than you might think, if you look at who is packing the meals.
In Sauk City, the nonprofit organization 6:8 Making Service Personal is planning its fourth annual Sauk Prairie Against Hunger (SPAH) Pack Event for October 22 to 24. Its goal is to pack 272,000 meals and to collect three tons of food and goods for the Sauk Prairie Food Pantry.
MADISON — The pack event for this year’s Feed My Sheep Lenten Project was held April 5 at the Catholic Multicultural Center (CMC) in Madison.
Sarah Ramthun, executive director for 6:8, the organization coordinating the project, reported that 552 volunteers packed 100,008 meals.
MADISON — Three and a half years ago, Madison area youth ministers were looking for a project that would engage their parishes in action befitting the Lenten season.
Several parishes banded together with the Catholic Multicultural Center, Kids Against Hunger, as well as the organization 6:8 Making Service Personal, and made a plan.
MADISON — In 2012 several parishes banded together with the Catholic Multicultural Center, Kids Against Hunger, as well as the organization 6:8 Making Service Personal and made a plan.
The plan, called Feed My Sheep, was to invite people from local Catholic parishes to donate toward building 25,000 meals for people in need in the Madison area and throughout the world. Each meal only cost a quarter, yet 25,000 meals sounded like a lot of quarters . . . and it was.
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| “Family Day — A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children” will be held on Monday, Sept. 26. |
When I was growing up, our family ate all of our meals together at home. This included breakfast, lunch, and supper. We sat around our kitchen table, often lingering to talk after the food was gone.
Mealtime became an opportunity to share our plans for the day, to find out what we thought about the day’s news, and even to debate various issues. My parents always encouraged open discussion, even on such topics as politics and religion.
With our own children, my husband and I also encouraged shared meal times. We almost always ate dinner together, even delaying the meal for sports and after-school activities so that we could sit down and share a meal.
I think our children — now grown with children of their own — enjoyed those times to eat and talk with each other. Now we like getting together with our extended families for meals. Even the grandchildren from babies and up are brought to the table when possible to join with the family for hors d’oeuvres and the meal.
The Churches’ Center for Land and People has recently received grant funding from the Wisconsin Farmer’s Union to sponsor indoor Winter Farmers Markets and Meals.
