SAN ANTONIO • Two officials from Catholic Relief Services (CRS) were recently in the Alamo city to meet with Archbishop José H. Gomez and to update him regarding the development of a new regional office here as well as programming that is being planned.
    The duo from CRS who met with Archbishop Gomez on March 3 were Joan F. Neal, vice president for U.S. operations, and Daniel Lizárraga, southwest regional director for U.S. operations.
    In her position at CRS, Neal oversees initiatives and programs that serve U.S. Catholics, including institutional and university relations, regional outreach and support, and policy and advocacy. Her area, U.S. operations, also manages such programs as the Global Fellows Program and the Fair Trade Coffee Project; diocesan and parish programs such as Global Solidarity Partnerships, Operation Rice Bowl and Work of Human Hands; and school-based programs such as Food Fast, Frontiers of Justice and Operation Days Work.

    Based in San Antonio, Lizárraga is primarily responsible for coordinating and directing CRS programs and services to U.S. Catholics in an eight state region consisting of 28 dioceses. However, Texas will demand the bulk of his attention, as it alone contains 15 dioceses. Five additional new CRS regional offices are located in Baltimore, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta.

    Neal said the vision for establishing six regional offices came out of a strategic plan which called for more robust outreach from CRS. “It’s a permanent change in the way we engage Catholics in the United States,” she explained.

    After being housed temporarily in offices at the AT&T Community Centre at San Fernando for the past several months, CRS operations here will soon be relocating to rented space in a vacant building on the campus of Oblate School of Theology, just across from Mount Sacred Heart School.

    Lizárraga said that, since his hiring last fall, he has been busy meeting with various entities to see how they can collaborate with CRS, such as the Mexican American Cultural Center, Oblate School of Theology and various departments within the chancery.
    Said Neal, “We’re here to collaborate with them. We don’t come with an agenda. We’re here to assist and enhance their work in partnership. They can count on us to provide resources to them.”

    Both Neal and Lizárraga emphasized that CRS, in establishing a presence in this predominately Hispanic area, wants to learn from the connections it makes here to develop ties with Mexico and Latin America.

    “It’s important in this region to have a lot of activities,” said Lizárraga. “We’re looking to develop adult formation programs based on Catholic social teaching and global solidarity to provide a good educational base. Then, we’ll look at advocacy programs dealing with immigration, fair trade and human trafficking in Latin America.”

    Neal said such efforts are in response to the U.S. bishops’ document, “Called to Global Solidarity.” In the pastoral letter, church leaders urge Catholics, especially youth and campus ministry groups, to learn about the issue of fair trade and how they can help in that.

    “We want to get together to see how we can do such activities more programmatically. We want to work out the ways in which we can do that,” said Neal. She also noted that, with four Catholic institutions of higher education located in the city of San Antonio, there is a lot of potential for that type of work here.

    The Fair Trade Program is an effort that educates Catholics about the benefits of fair trade and creates opportunities to promote international economic justice through principled decisions about how to shop. Through the purchase of fairly traded coffee, tea, cocoa, chocolate, handcrafts and more, participants can advance a new, more just model of international trade.

    Related to that effort is Work of Human Hands, an alternative trade program implemented in partnership with A Greater Gift, which offers handmade quality goods crafted by and purchased directly from artisans in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe.

    “We want people to know more about the Fair Trade Program,” said Neal. “In the educational piece, we teach about the issue of faith trade, but we also move from education to the concrete through the purchase of fair trade coffee and fair trade chocolate.”

    The most well-known of all CRS programs is Operation Rice Bowl, the organization’s Lenten solidarity activity. Over the past four years, Catholics in the Archdiocese of San Antonio have contributed almost $380,000 to this effort, including almost $108,000 in 2005 alone. This year, the program is being used by millions of Catholics in all 50 states and in more than 15,000 parishes, schools and other faith communities. Through Operation Rice Bowl, donors reach out around the world through traditional Lenten practices by offering prayers, by fasting, by learning and by giving.

    Neal described how Operation Rice Bowl, which has been in existence for 31 years, gives Catholics an opportunity to learn about people overseas and why they are hungry. “Each year we look at five different countries and five struggling families. We learn what it is to be hungry. It gets people in connection with hunger.”

    In 2005, according to Neal, $16 million was collected by Operation Rice Bowl. From those funds 75 percent of the money was sent overseas, while 25 percent remains in each diocese.