The St. Jerome (Hyattsville, MD) chapter of the Ladies of Charity organized a dinner on Feb. 11th for the University of Maryland’s Catholic Student Center (CSC). Every Wednesday during the school year, the CSC holds 5:30 Mass followed by dinner, which provided by a local parish. This is the third academic year St. Jerome LOC has signed up for a couple of Wednesdays, with our Junior LOC chapter providing many of the servers. The university athletic teams’ slogan is Fear the Turtle (the mascot is a Maryland terrapin) so the St. Jerome LOC, in a play on words, have dubbed their effort Feed the Turtle.
We usually plan to feed about 150 or so, but this time the CSC was having an interfaith event, so we probably fed at least 250, about 100 people more than usual! Our servers included five members of our JLOC chapter, our director of religious education and her husband, one of our Knights, and a friar drafted at the last minute. We only learned about the special event a day ahead of time, but a last-minute SOS sent out to the Ladies and our brother Knights of Columbus enabled us to feed everyone generously and still have plenty of leftovers to leave in the CSC kitchen. God still multiplies loaves & fishes!
Fr. Rob Walsh, the chaplain, and Ann Gradowski, director of development and administration, have a thriving parish going at the CSC – go to http://www.catholicterps.org/ and see just how many opportunities they offer both Catholics and those curious about Catholicism.
