NEWS & EVENTS
The CONTINUING STORY
OF THE GOOD (GREAT!) WORKS OF THE
GERALD RYAN
OUTREACH CENTER
Excerpt from Board President Joe Gibbons' Letter to parishioners, supporters, volunteers and staff members.....
March 30th, 2023
POPE FRANCIS' HISTORIC JOURNEY TO Africa in February
1 million attend joyful Mass with Pope Francis in Democratic Republic of Congo
Friends,
The yellow forsythia bushes are blooming everywhere, daffodils are starting to bloom, and it looks like the tulips will be blooming soon! Spring is here and ...life is good!
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The six-week PAL/First Precinct/Outreach Center soccer clinic starts on Monday April 3rd and the children are ready to play, this is a feel-good event for the community, the children, the families, and the First Precinct. We need coaching help and we welcome anyone who is willing to help! Wyandanch Park, Mondays from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
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Career Expo Fresh Start Program: The Outreach Center together with the Suffolk County Department of Labor, hosted a job fair yesterday at the Parish hall; more than 35 companies were represented including Amazon, Northwell Health, Frito-Lay, LI Cares, Suffolk County PD. Attendance was high and this is a worthwhile community service. We host this event twice a year and are grateful for its continued success.
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In partnership with Northwell Health, we also host a Baby Cafe; this program supports breastfeeding mothers and meets bi-weekly in the Parish Hall. This is a national program to support a health equity initiative for low income communities.
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The Outreach is partnering with NYU Langone to introduce a Hearing Loss program. Its objective is to detect hearing loss in children ages 0 to 6 years old in lower income communities. This will help to identify those children needing help before they start school.
We thank Father Charlince Vendredy for his continued support of the Outreach initiatives.
On Thursday, April 13th (estimated) the Outreach Center will be receiving a massive food delivery from the Church of Latter Day Saints; a tractor trailer with 24 pallets of food and other supplies will be dropped off here. We are in need of manual labor to help us unload the truck and reload the food into a container. Covanta will supply a forklift and we already have a pallet jack. We are very excited to receive this food and plan to share the supplies with other food pantries.
As you know, our annual Outreach Center Summer Camp Golf Outing will be held on May 22nd at Indian Hills Country Club in Northport this year, a new BMW will be sitting by the 6th hole waiting for another hole-in-one. In 2019, one golfer actually shot a hole-in-one on one of the par 3's. This is a straight, 150 par 3 (121 for the lady's tee) that all of you can reach!! Even a blind pig finds a corncob sometimes :-) One golfer will win a new set of TaylorMade Stealth Irons as a door prize (valued at $1,000); we will also raffle off other prizes as well! The foursomes are filling up fast so if you plan on playing, let me know so I can add you to the list. Come join the fun and be with good people for a great cause!
The 50/50 is over $2,000 and growing daily. We are looking for more sponsors (for tee signs, holes) as these help offset camp costs; I have a deadline to order the flags by of the end of April . See the website for details: https://www.eventregisterpro.com/event/grocannualgolfouting
Thank you and we need your support for this worthy cause!
Joe
Rome Newsroom, Feb 1, 2023 / 04:30 am
By Hannah Brockhaus
More than 1 million people attended Pope Francis’ Mass in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday morning, according to local authorities.
The Mass in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital city, took place on the airfield of the N’Dolo Airport on the second day of the pope’s trip to two countries in central and east Africa.
Catholics attended a prayer vigil with confessions and music the night of Jan. 31; some people who traveled from far away stayed at the airport all night until the morning Mass on Feb. 1.
People gathered in the field hours before the start of Mass at 9:30 a.m. local time. Catholics danced and sang songs, including a joyful chant of “Maman Maria,” which means “Mama Mary” in French, as they awaited Pope Francis’ arrival.
According to statistics from the Vatican, there are more than 52 million Catholics in the DRC, almost half of the total population of more than 105 million people.
Pope Francis celebrated Mass in French, the official language of DRC, and Lingala, the Bantu-based creole spoken in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and by millions of speakers across Central Africa.
The pope delivered his homily in Italian with French translations for the Mass, which was celebrated according to the Zaire Use of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite.
The Zaire Use of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite is an inculturated Mass formally approved in 1988 for the dioceses of what was then known as the Republic of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Pilgrims used umbrellas, hats, and even sheets of paper to shade themselves from the sun as temperatures soared into the low 90s Fahrenheit.
“Brothers and sisters, with Jesus, evil never wins, evil never has the last word,” Pope Francis said at Mass.
“‘For he is our peace,’" he added, “and his peace is triumphant. Consequently, we who belong to Jesus must never yield to sorrow; we must not permit resignation and fatalism to take hold of us. Even though that atmosphere reigns all around us, it must not be so for us.”
To see more photos of the Pope's visit to Africa and the entire article from The Catholic News Agency ....CLICK PHOTO