To judge from press reports, an outsider could easily be misled into the perception that an obsession with genitals and what we do about them, is an important part of Catholicism. It isn’t. Formally, sexual matters fall into what is known as the “third level” of Catholic teaching (that’s third, as in bottom). Numerous surveys of Catholic people similarly found that sexual matters are way down the list of what they regard as characteristic of what it is to be a Catholic. Far more important, both formally and in popular priorities , are things like the fundamental beliefs about God, saints and sacraments - and service.

Real, hands on service to the poor and marginalised - as in this example, from the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, San Francisco. (What I particularly like about this program is that it is not simply about handouts. In the words of its webpage, it’s “about fellowship, not food”.)

Wednesday Suppers is a charitable outreach program of Most Holy Redeemer Church under the leadership of the Pastor who is assisted by the Wednesday Suppers Program Advisory Team. The Wednesday Suppers focus on fellowship, not food. Their purpose is to cultivate relationships with our homeless neighbors in the Castro, to affirm community with them and understand their needs, with a special emphasis on homeless youth.

- Wednesday Suppers, Most Holy Redeemer website

With one parishioner’s challenge to welcome the stranger, the annual Lenten soup and bread suppers at Most Holy Redeemer Parish in San Francisco became a ministry that would grow to serve a weekly, homemade multicourse meal and warm Catholic hospitality to 100 men and women from all over the city.

The spark for the parish’s Wednesday Suppers was struck in 2001 when a parishioner at that year’s Lenten light meal commented, as program director
Ron Pacheco recalled in a recent interview, that “we walk over homeless people on the way to this dinner.” The parishioner went out into the street and invited four or five people to join the meal.

Rising to the challenge, the parish then developed a dinner for homeless youth who had migrated to San Francisco and often found it a tough place to survive. Eventually the needs of youth were served by other providers and the weekly supper at the Castro District parish attracted people of all ages, most of them from outside the neighborhood.

“All regulars,” Pacheco said. “We keep a list. As they fall off, new people are added. We keep the number at 100. They’re checked off and given a name tag. The intent was to develop a little community. The same people come. They sit with their Wednesday night friends. It’s a good meal; it’s a time they’re waited on unlike any other place.”

In the first days the church had just been remodeled and there was some resistance to offering such hospitality to the homeless, Pacheco said. But in time the community began to regard the guests not as unpredictable strangers but as “our homeless people.” The parishioners have for the most part adopted the program, with 30 volunteers and three collections a year. The program provides a barber and podiatrist and distributes clothing and screens a movie monthly, and medical personnel are in-house weekly. More than 200 bag lunches are issued weekly for men and women to take away for another meal. “Nobody goes away hungry,” Pacheco said.

- from Catholic San Francisco

For more information, visit www.mhr.org/wed-suppers.html

For pictures, see