You did it for Me? Is that what it means to follow the social teachings of the Catholic Church? During a recent CROP walk, Roncalli High School Lasallian Youth raised nearly $900 to end poverty in Manitowoc, WI and in the wider world. University of Wisconsin Green Bay Catholic Campus Ministry students folded, pasted, colored and marked “Happy Fall” cards after the October 26, 2008 Sunday Eucharist for area elderly. You did it for Me?
In the second of a Today’s Catholic Teacher educator development series of articles on the theme of Catholic Social Principles, Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity Sister Kay Klackner, OSF begins with a quote from the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The Second Vatican Council prelates (1965) wrote that:
In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of absolutely every person, and of actively helping him [or her] when he [or she] comes across our path, whether he [or she] be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he [or she] did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord: “As long as you did it for one of these, the least of my brethen, you did it for me.”
Practically speaking, the Roncalli Lasallian youth and the UWGB college students’ outreach shows that they are making the poor and the elderly their neighbors, Jesus in the flesh. Read Sister Kay’s entire article on the foundational principle, respect for the life and dignity of the human person, a central construct of the Catholic Social tradition.
Conscious of people struggling the most in these tough economic times, what are other examples of “you did it for Me?”
(First photo: Fred Graber, Madison, WI)
