Catholic in the City: A Woman's Journey to Living Out Her Faith

This letter is written by a friend of mine, Rene Ronquillo, to Mayor Berry in Albuquerque. It highlights some of the issues that we in Albuquerque are facing. Feel free to comment. I know this is a hot button issue. It could happen to anyone – all it takes is a small twist of fate. A debilitating injury, an accident, a divorce, loss of a job…all of these could lead to homelessness. The recent arrests of two men for feeding the homeless without a permit are terrible tragedies and a sad display of the priorities of our city and APD. Why would the honest giving of one person to another require a permit? Poor and homeless people will always be a very real part of our society, and I know that if I ever became a person in need, I would be so grateful that someone cared enough to spend every Sunday afternoon for 4 years helping to make sure that my belly was full. The police are claiming that feeding the homeless requires a permit and that that is why these men were arrested. Since wh

In 2008-2009 I took my first JustFaith class at Risen Savior parish. At the end of that course one of my goals was to help the environment by stopping junk mail from arriving at my home. First, it is rare that I look through any of my junk mail. Secondly, the purpose of junk mail is primarily so people purchase what is being advertised. Well since I don't look through my junk mail I don't purposely purchase the things being advertised therefore defeating junk mails purpose. I do throw it into my paper recycle bin but what would be better for the environment would be to stop junk mail from coming to my house all together. Did you know that: Each year in our country 4.5 million tons of junk mail is produced. It uses 100 million trees a year and wastes 28 billion gallons of water for paper processing each year. This is so sad considering there are places in our world that have difficulty finding drinking water. On average each person receives 1.5 personal letters each week compare

This last week I shadowed the Center for Immigration & Citizenship Legal Assistance at Catholic Charities. Interesting enough parts of the Arizona SB-1070 law took affect on Thursday. It was a great week for me to ask a lot of questions and learn a lot about our broken immigration system. I have avoided the topic of immigration in previous blogs because of the tense political climate in the US around immigration for as long as I have known. So rather than feed the frenzy I am going to just tell a few stories. Nine months ago Catholic Charities was introduced to a refugee Cuban family consisting of two people, a mother and her adult son. Legally, after one year and one day of being a refugee in the US (with proper documentation) refugees can petition for legal permanent resident (LPR) status. The paperwork process for Catholic Charities and the clients in these cases are usually not difficult because refugees have been with Catholic Charities for quite some time and Catholic Chariti

This is the end of my second week at Catholic Charities in Albuquerque and I am loving it. I am learning a lot. My first week I shadowed the Center for Self-Sufficiency and Housing Assistance. This last week I shadowed the Center for Refugee Settlement and Support. I am shadowing all of the Centers at Catholic Charities so that I can go out and educate the community on Catholic Charities and Catholic Social Teaching - the tenants that are the mission and vision of the organization. For me to give these presentations around the Archdiocese of Santa Fe I myself need to know what Catholic Charities does, hence, my 5-6 weeks of shadowing and researching. This week at the Center for Refugees my heart has been broken. A refugee according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee as a person who has fled his/her country of origin/residency and who is unwilling/unable to return because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, polit

It's been a while since I have posted a blog! So many good things have happened in the last few months that have made me quite busy! I got married to the love of my life, Mike. We went on a wonderful honeymoon to Maui. I discerned to leave Newman as the Director of Campus Ministry to pursue my passion and deep calling for social justice. And by the grace of God, tomorrow, I am starting a new job with Catholic Charities as the parish and faith community outreach liaison. In this position I will be teaching Catholic Social Teaching and spreading the mission of Catholic Charities to both Catholic & other Christian Churches in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. I immensely feel the love of God. One new thing that I am involved in is starting a Cristo Rey High School in Albuquerque! There are 24 successful Cristo Rey High Schools in cities throughout the country. These schools provide a private, Catholic, college preparatory education to students who otherwise cannot afford this type of

Ever since I was an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego I have had a deep devotion to St. Catherine of Siena. She is someone that I have always had deep admiration for and have found deep spiritual companionship with. She was born in 1347; a time that was challenging for women to be in roles of authority. Yet, because of her deep desire to seek God and truth, veritas , she found the strength and courage to speak truth to power when she noticed injustices occurring in front of her. For example Catherine, during the Avignon papacy, through letter writing, implored that Pope Gregory XI move the papacy back to Rome. Her deep spirituality and love of God guided her to move in the direction in which the Spirit was moving her. As some of you might have already heard after serious discernment and prayer I have decided not to return as the Director of Campus Ministry with the Aquinas Newman Center for the 2010-2011 academic year. This prayerful decision was difficult. I t

A barren island. This is the sight we encountered when we took an air boat on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 to a barrier island on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. What is a barrier island? A barrier island is an island that is a buffer for the land when hurricanes come through. These barrier islands, not only help as a buffer, they also have wildlife that live on them, therefore keeping the ecosystem of the wetlands alive and vibrant. Barrier islands in Coastal Louisiana are also called wetlands. These wetlands/islands are also important because they prevent flooding by holding water much like a sponge. As stewards of creation (Gen 1:28) we must be aware of what we are doing to our earth and attempt to remedy the wrongdoings. The barrier islands of coastal Louisiana are slowly deteriorating. This erosion is occurring because of several factors such as: hurricanes, human made levees to direct the Mississippi River from flowing in its natural course, and the drilling of

From March 14th to 20th, 2010, I was in New Orleans, Louisiana on a spring break service trip with college students from the University of New Mexico and resident parishioners from the Aquinas Newman Center. On Thursday night Jocelyn Sideco, the executive director of Contemplatives in Action ( http://www.contemplativesinaction.org/ ), the non-profit that helped to plan our trip, led us in a evening of reflection. We had been having very deep evening reflections as a team, but this evening, Jocelyn gathered all forty of the participants staying at the location we were staying at for prayer. We lined up in four straight lines of ten. She had us stretch and then close our eyes. She had us reflect upon our senses and what we had experienced in New Orleans via our senses. The next few blogs will highlight a sense and give at least one example of how that heightened my experience of New Orleans. Touch. On Thursday morning we went to the Lower Ninth Ward Village Community Center. Mac, a man

"They will know we are Christians by our Love." Today I heard a speaker, Thomas Awiapo, speak upon his experience with Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The first sentence I wrote was how he started his talk; a Catholic hymnal. He spoke of the beauty of his country, Northern Ghana, the moon, the simple things like brushing ones teeth with twigs, and the tragedies of poverty such as hunger. Mentioning that poverty and riches can both be beautiful and difficult; that we must live in harmony and not in constant struggle with the powers that be. Thomas did not know his parents. They passed away before he could remember. He was left with three brothers. They would cry a lot because they were so hungry. He talked about how at times the four of them would crowd over a small bowl of food and fight over it; survival instinct. He saw two of them die of hunger right in front of him. Then one evening his older brother said to him that this life was too hard, by the morning, his brother wa

St. Dismas and Jesus On Saturday, as part of the Newman Justice Walking group, we went to Dismas House. Dismas House, as mentioned in another blog, is a home for motivated people who are on parole and probation to successfully transition into society. While we were there one of the social workers told us who the patron of Dismas was. Although not a lot is known about St. Dismas the little that is known is powerful. St. Dismas was the man crucified next to Jesus in Calvary. He repented to Jesus before he died and then Jesus said, "Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Lk 23:43). This penitent man is therefore known as the saint of second chances. About fifteen minutes into eating lunch with the residents of Dismas House a man came in and sat right in front of me. Outwardly he seemed not put together. I judged him immediately. Then he started to eat. He ate as if he had not eaten a meal in days. Food was flying everywhere. I judged him again. After this s

An image I took from a housebuilding trip to Juarez a few years back with UNM college students. Below is an article I wrote for the People of God, the Catholic Archdiocesan Newspaper for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. It will be published in April. College Justice Walking: A Journey of Faith and Transformation Do you know what Catholic Social Teaching is about? Catholic Social Teaching has been said to be the best kept secret of the Catholic Church. Twelve students at the University of New Mexico’s Aquinas Newman Center are embarking on a journey to learn and live the Church’s social teachings with a program called College Justice Walking. The Newman Center has been asked to be a pilot group for this program in the country. This seven week series, including an opening and closing retreat, opens up the rich treasure of the Church’s social teachings through prayer, praxis, and the educational components of reading, the bible and supplemental books, and discussion. These students will be

People walking in rubble in the market area in Port-Au-Prince in Haiti on Jan. 18th, 2010 Picture taken from the Internet Yesterday I was watching a documentary on Canada's response to what happened to the United States on September 11th, 2001. Within two hours of the time that the second plane hit the second tower in New York City all of the airspace in the United States was closed. Every plane in the United State was on the ground. This meant that the planes that were flying to the United States over the Atlantic Ocean, whom could not turn back to Europe, had to continue on their air route but be redirected. Most of them were directed towards Canada. The documentary focused on the city of Gander. Gander in on an island named Newfoundland on the far East of Canada. The city of Gander has a population of 10,000 people. NAV Canada, the equivalent of the United States FAA, redirected 239 air crafts to Western Canada. On September 11th, 2001 the city of Gander, within hours, received

"Not by might, nor by power but by my Spirit, says your God" (Zechariah, 4:6). Power. What is it and why don't we acknowledge we have it even though we do? As middle class citizens of the United States (really if we look globally we are much richer than middle class) and as people who "have", even if we don't realize it, we have power. We have the power to make choices, power to go to school, power to spend money the way we want to, power to vote, power to choose how we are going to spend our day, power to say who can and cannot cross our borders...and the list goes on. We are blessed to have this power. But to have power means that we also bare the responsibility of using the power when appropriate. The easiest place for me to start discussion about the issue of power is when it comes to social justice issues. Many people who are in poverty throughout our world do not have the resources to advocate for themselves due to the fact that their worldview is dic

I have been interacting with a lot of people lately who are discerning what their next step in life should be. Discernment about what our true vocation is, from my experience, seems to be somewhat never ending. This is not to say that those who are currently seeking what their next step in life should be are in a place that is not important. What I think is ultimately important is that we continuously remind ourselves that God is in control. We can make a decision and it could be right or wrong (although in my book things are not as clear as right or wrong). If the decision is not the right decision God will steer us back if we truly listen to what God is saying. Ever since I was a small child I dreamed of being a pediatrician. I love kids. I wanted to work with them and heal them. That is why I wanted to go to University of California, San Diego and be pre-med. UCSD is one of the best schools in California for pre-medical education. I remember vividly laying in bed one night in high s

"In my fast, make me an empty bowl - that you may fill the hallow space in me with love." - a portion of "In My Prayer" by Attique Swati of Pakistan from the book Prayer Without Borders, page 32, published by Catholic Relief Services in 2004. I just got back from my JustFaith group at Immaculate Conception parish in downtown Albuquerque. In the session we talked about Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org) and what they do as an organization. We also read a part of Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth). Appropriately, on Ash Wednesday, one of the main themes for this evenings JustFaith was world hunger. How can my "empty bowl" be filled with God's love? Those who have recently met me would never know that I actually was one hundred pounds heavier about seven years ago. I was gluttonous when it came to food. I ate to feel loved. Food was my constant comfort. When I was in graduate school something clicked in my heart. Why was I