Brooklyn priests Father Hugues Berrette and Father Charlie Keeney traveled the Diocese of Little Rock with eight other priests from July 7–9 on a pastor immersion trip hosted by Catholic Extension, a nonprofit organization that supports the Church in poor and remote mission dioceses nationwide.
Jean Fedigan, founder of a nonprofit in the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona, that serves homeless and trafficked women, is the 2022-2023 recipient of Catholic Extension’s Lumen Christi Award.
Chicago-based Catholic Extension launched the first of many initiatives it has planned over the next 18 months to support Uvalde, Texas, following the devastation of the Robb Elementary mass shooting.
The a four-person delegation from the Diocese of Brooklyn joined an “immersion” trip to tour the collaborative work shared by Sister Norma Pimentel and Catholic Extension to help thousands of asylum seekers stuck at the U.S./Mexico border.
Father Keeney, director of the Diocese of Brooklyn’s office of Propagation of the Faith, last month traveled to the cherry orchards near Yakima, Washington for an up-close look at how the local diocese ministers to the seasonal workers who are mostly from Mexico and Guatemala. Chicago-based Catholic Extension, a nonprofit group working to build up Catholic communities in the nation’s poorest regions, sponsored the trip.
Chicago-based Catholic Extension plans to help 1,000 women religious with grants in memory of a group of sisters who died in late December of COVID-19 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin.
Days after Pope Francis issued his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” calling for people of goodwill to care for one another as brothers and sisters and not to erect new borders between people and nations, Catholic Extension announced a 2,000-mile act of prayer along the U.S.-Mexico border.
With the help of Catholic Extension and two other organizations, four Catholic dioceses in Puerto Rico were selected to receive to $82 million in “hazard mitigation funding” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
COVID-19 infection rates in the Navajo Nation surpassed that of New York last month, giving it the unwanted distinction of having the highest per capita infections of any place in the country and placing a strain on already over-taxed Catholic ministries in the region.
Catholic Extension will be helping families left without their main financial supporter in Mississippi, where families lost their breadwinner after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out massive raids Aug. 7.
