CORONA — DoorDash and Uber Eats conveniently deliver people’s favorite foods to their doorstep. But a group of religious sisters is bringing something better to people’s homes — food for the soul.
Sisters from the Missionaries of Mary for Faith Formation are part of the evangelization team, a faith outreach program at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Corona.
The concept is simple: volunteers make house calls, bearing the comfort of Jesus Christ.
The sisters, who were the first to volunteer for the team, visit a family, bring bags of nonperishable food, pray the rosary with them (or teach them to pray it if they don’t know how), and sit with members of the household to talk about God’s love.
The idea is to reach out to families who live within the parish boundaries of Our Lady of Sorrows Church but who aren’t regular churchgoers, and bring them closer to God and to the parish, said Mother Clara de la Cruz, the superior of the Missionaries of Mary for Faith Formation.
If the family members are regular churchgoers, the home visits serve to reinforce their faith, she added.
“We love doing this. We talk to people in a place where they are most comfortable — their home. I believe such a setting makes it easier for people to listen and to hear the word of God,” Mother Clara said.
Father Manuel de Jesus Rodriguez, the pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows, called the evangelization team “a wonderful, different way to reach people.”
The evangelization team visits at least one family each week. It’s not a quick stop. The sisters usually spend hours with their hosts, even sitting down to dinner with them.
“Sitting down with people across a kitchen table, that is how you make connections,” Father Rodriguez said. “Once they make that connection, they can go on to tell the families about programs we have at the parish.”
The majority of the families the sisters visit are immigrants, mostly from Central and South America.
According to the Furman Center at New York University, 63.8% of residents living in the Corona/Elmhurst area of Queens in 2021 were foreign born.
Many of the families who welcome the sisters into their homes are struggling financially, and while the visits do not solve their money woes, they do reinforce the fact that God is with them all the time.
On a recent Saturday, Mother Clara and four of the sisters paid a visit to Nancy and Teodoro Avila and their children, who are immigrants from Ecuador.
Teodoro, a construction worker, and Nancy, a stay-at-home mom, speak little to no English. Luckily, the sisters are fluent in Spanish and the couple’s children are bilingual.
There were hugs all around as the sisters entered the family’s first-floor apartment.
“We are so grateful to the sisters. They bring light into our home,” Teodoro said as his daughter Katty translated.
Katty, a seventh grader at Corona Arts and Science Academy, and her sister Aileen, a fifth grader at Pioneer Academy/P.S. 307, talked to the sisters about schoolwork.
The happy, casual chatting might not seem important, but Mother Clara begged to differ. “One of the most important things we do as evangelizers is listen. When people are relaxed, they talk more openly to you about their lives and their concerns,” she explained.
Katty Avila said she felt as if she made new friends. “The sisters are so nice. I like them a lot,” she added.
Within minutes, everyone repaired to the backyard, where Teodoro took great pleasure in showing Mother Clara the vegetable garden he planted.
It was then time for the highlight of the visit — praying the rosary.
To make it memorable for the Avilas, the sisters set up a series of small, battery-operated lights in a circle on the kitchen floor and interspersed the lights with flowers. The effect was to make the lights resemble rosary beads. After each Hail Mary was recited, one of the Avila children pressed the top of the light to turn it on.
By the end of the decades of the rosary, all of the lights were shining, setting off a beautiful glow in the kitchen.
The visit was similar to the housecalls the sisters have made throughout Corona. In the past year, the evangelization team has paid more than 50 home visits.
The team finds the families through a variety of ways. In some cases, parishioners approach them to suggest families in need of assistance.
The team has also found families through their children. For example, the sisters noticed children taking part in a summer camp program who seemed to be wearing the same clothes day after day. The sisters guessed that the children came from families who could use help.
Currently, the sisters are the only team members, but the long-term goal is to train parishioners to join the team so that they can pay the housecalls and evangelize across kitchen tables.