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Announcement includes new pastors, chancery appointments, new deanery names, clergy meetings underway for clusters beginning July 2020

As the House of Representatives passed legislation June 25 to provide $4.5 billion in emergency funding for humanitarian aid at the U.S.-Mexico border, local Catholics are on the scene or heading there to support families seeking legal asylum.

Father Barouyr Shernezian, pastor of St. Gregory the Illuminator Armenian Orthodox Church in San Francisco joined Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone for vespers at Star of the Sea Church in San Francisco June 21. The service began the celebration of Religious Freedom Week June 22-29.

Salesian Father Armand Oliveri has moved through the city blocks around Sts. Peter and Paul Church in San Francisco for the better part of a century. His family moved there from Italy in 1929 and by the time he left the parish middle school he knew he wanted to be a priest.

Fridays won’t be the same for a small community of Marin County Catholics. The Catholic Marin Breakfast Club, founded by a local parishioner in 1994 to bring local Catholics together one Friday morning a month for Mass, a speaker of interest to the faithful and breakfast, gathered for a final time on May 3 at St. Sebastian Church in Greenbrae.

San Francisco’s Epiphany Center, a legacy of the Daughters of Charity’s ministry to distressed women and children dating to the roots of post-Gold Rush San Francisco, is providing extra help to one group most in need today: Those addicted to drugs and alcohol.

A few dozen people were gathered in the dining room of the Catholic Worker Hospitality House in San Bruno for breakfast on a drizzly Wednesday morning. Tables were filled with guests chatting and enjoying company or taking quiet time to eat breakfast alone, while volunteers served breakfast and stopped to talk with guests. Pausing his work for a moment in the dining room, Peter Stiehler, the house’s director, told Catholic San Francisco, “You can see what we do here is serious, but it’s lighthearted too. It reflects the joy here.”

San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood is the city’s “forgotten place,” say Catholic Charities outreach workers who walk the area daily to offer hope and support for those without homes or living in makeshift housing. The need is greatest around the former naval shipyard site north of Candlestick Park, five miles from downtown, where the city’s largest population of homeless or near-homeless outside the Tenderloin lives in tents, vehicles and abandoned buildings. Although relatively free from the gaze of the public, property owners and police, this mixed population of San Francisco residents and transients also is invisible. Catholic San Francisco accompanied a Catholic Charities Bayview Access Point team to the former shipyard area on March 13.

On March 15th the Hibernian-Newman Club held its 55th Annual St. Patrick’s Day Luncheon at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, with more than 800 in attendance. Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone was among the dignitaries attending and gave the invocation. 

The Vatican has granted a plenary indulgence and a papal blessing for those who participate in the Mass preceding Walk for Life West Coast, including those who are sick and infirm and praying along with the participants on Jan. 26, the archdiocese announced.

This week we celebrate the mission of Catholic schools and their cherished legacy. We also recommit ourselves to assuring their future because they are critical to the life of the Church. Catholics schools are privileged places for young people to encounter Jesus Christ through Catholic faith, Catholic culture, and the Catholic intellectual tradition on a daily basis as they learn and grow and develop. Because Catholic schools are called to be, as Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, of Vancouver states, “inspired by a supernatural vision, founded on Christian anthropology, animated by communion and community, imbued with a Catholic worldview throughout the curriculum, and sustained by Gospel witness,“ they are the ideal and obvious institutions to help address a growing problem facing the Catholic Church.

A pilot project its organizers hope will expand to all Catholic schools in the San Francisco archdiocese introduces students to the God-driven purpose, planning and power behind vocations, sacred and secular.