Catholic Relief Services

Catholic Relief Services works with organizations around the world to help poor and vulnerable people overcome emergencies, earn a living through agriculture and access affordable health care.

ENCOUNTER LENT:

CRS Rice Bowl is Catholic Relief Services’ Lenten faith-in-action program.

It offers opportunities for your family to engage daily in the spiritual pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. And, it’s an opportunity for us as a parish/school to come together as a community and reflect on what it means to live out our Gospel call to go out and encounter those most in need. During the next 40 days, we will encounter the stories of people in Iraq, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso and other places around the world where CRS is at work. We’ll be invited to eat simple, meatless meals each Friday from these countries. And, through the stories, we’ll learn about the principles of Catholic social teaching—and ways we can put them into action during Lent and beyond.

Rice Bowls will be available in the Narthex beginning on Ash Wednesday and through Lent until Palm Sunday.

STORIES OF HOPE:

The first stop on our Lenten journey is #Iraq where we encounter a young boy, Majd, and his family, displaced by violence from their homes

Click on this picture to read his story

LOOKING FOR MEATLESS MEALS TO PREPARE THIS LENT?

Fasting from meat on Fridays during Lent helps us “acquire a mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart.”(CCC 2043). Fasting is meant to free us. It helps us feel our physical hunger, and in turn, our spiritual hunger for the infinite love found only in God.  Here are some sample meatless recipes

When you’ve cleaned your plate, remember to put the money you saved by not buying meat – an average of $3 per person per meal – into your CRS Rice Bowl to feed our brothers and sisters in need around the world.

STAY CONNECTED MORE INFO, DONATE!

Download the CRS Rice Bowl App!

With the CRS Rice Bowl app, you can put Lent at your fingertips with new daily reflections and recipes, integrated social sharing and a new way to track your Lenten sacrifices! The CRS Rice Bowl app is available in English and Spanish in the Google Play and App stores — just click the picture above

DONATE

Our Catholic community in the United States does something amazing each Lent. We come together to practice prayer, fasting and almsgiving—and by doing so we help lift families and communities out of poverty and put them on a path toward resilience, prosperity and stability. That’s the CRS Rice Bowl effect.

To make a donation click on the donate button or us this QR code.

Why is Catholic Relief Services important to our Parish?

“A parish reaching beyond its own members and beyond national boundaries is a truly ‘catholic’ parish. An important role for the parish is to challenge and encourage every believer to greater global solidarity.”

Called to Global Solidarity International Challenges for U.S. Parishes, U.S. Catholic Conference, 1997

Catholic Relief Services, an organization of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is a pro-life organization dedicated to preserving the sacredness and dignity of human life from conception to natural death. Every aspect of our work is to help life flourish. We are resolute in our commitment to the Church and its teaching.

Moved by the Gospel, CRS not only assists the poor, but goes even farther by assisting the very poorest of the poor, responding to the Church’s challenge to act in solidarity with the most vulnerable, and leading the Catholic faithful in the United States in doing the same. Furthermore, while it is an official agency of the Catholic Church, CRS serves people based on need, not on creed, offering life-saving assistance to people of all faiths, and people of no faith.

How does our parish participate in the work of CRS?

Our parish has always been very committed to assisting the work and outreach of CRS through emergency relief efforts, the Lenten Rice Bowl effort and the CRS collection on Palm Sunday.

We also have parish ambassadors. CRS Parish Ambassadors are active parishioners with a passion for global solidarity who help strengthen the parish’s outreach ministry by organizing global discipleship activities in their parish. Our parish Ambassadors are Carol Woodward and Debbie Bowen. Please contact them via the parish office if you have any questions about CRS.

How do I find out more about the work of Catholic Relief Services?

Visit www.crs.org for resources and information