Catholic Organizations and the Heart of Jesus

Friends, peace be with you. 

This weekend, we welcome the Knights of Columbus with their annual Tootsie Roll Drive to support people with disabilities. Please be generous. I have a memory of sitting with the Knights in 2021 talking about how they were going to have to use gloves to hand out Tootsie Rolls and wear a mask and stay 6 feet away from people. It’s another memory that I’m glad is in the past. 

Covid basically destroyed communal efforts and gatherings. As we’re all keenly aware, we became so concerned with avoiding the virus that we avoided any gathering, including church. I personally feel that helping people get comfortable being in groups has been and continues to be one of the most important aspects of evangelization we can do. There are people who are absolutely terrified to be around others, which is not good. We are social animals. Even introverts like me can see that it’s important to interact with people. I love riding my bike by myself on Mondays but I also very much look forward to getting to Jams Coffee shop in Urbana and getting a bacon, cheddar, and chive scone by the smiling faces of the workers there. I enjoy hearing how their day is going before I snarf it down along with a flavored water. 

The next step we need to work on is our Catholic charitable organizations like the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Daughters, the ACCW, and the Hibernians. These groups have especially suffered because of the pandemic. People stopped attending when they had to shut down and even fewer have returned since the reopening. This started before the pandemic since people in my age group and younger tend to be suspicious of joining groups and getting over involved. And, unfortunately, some of these groups have lost their focus on charity and seem more social in nature, which is even less interesting to people my age and younger.

I invite you to consider returning to or joining the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic Daughters, the ACCW, the Hibernians, or whatever other Catholic organization you know of. Go and support their charitable efforts. If you become dissatisfied because the overall direction isn’t charitable, let the leadership know and then look for another, similar organization. We need you, especially people in their 40s and younger, to be a part of these organizations. Now is the time for us to engage the heart of Jesus in our lives through serving the poor.