Three seminarians from St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota spent three weeks at St. Mary of the Lake-Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, 4220 N. Sheridan Road, helping migrant families as part of an immersion program with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).

Two other seminarians spent three weeks at St. Thomas of Canterbury Church, 4827 N. Kenmore Ave., working in the soup kitchen and food pantry.

The three men at St. Mary’s spent most of their time trying to find housing for three migrant families from Venezuela. They also helped with the parish’s laundry ministry, in which volunteers wash clothes for people who are homeless and for elderly residents of a nearby low-income living facility, and they helped at the parish’s weekly dinner for migrants and homeless people on Wednesdays.

Trying to find housing for the families, all of whom are being accompanied by the parish, meant a lot of time searching the internet and calling landlords.

“The biggest thing is finding out if the landlords are open to housing them,” said John Dyson, a seminarian for the Diocese of Boise.

There were a lot of rejections, said Dyson, who was able to find an apartment on Jan. 24 for the family he was helping.

The other two seminarians, Isaiah Lippert and Tim Guidry, were unable to find housing for their assigned families during their three-week immersion period.

Trying to find housing was difficult and frustrating, said Guidry, who is studying for the Diocese of Crookston.

“Even the people who get back to us are not eager to house migrants,” he said.

Isaiah Lippert, who is studying for the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota, did not have any experience finding an apartment himself, so he had to learn what questions to ask and what to consider from the other seminarians.

“It’s kind of a grind in general,” he said adding that people warned them it would be difficult to find housing for the families, especially with the monetary constraints. He was trying to find housing around St. Mary of the Lake for a couple and a baby for under $1,100.

The immersion program has already impacted the seminarians.

“It’s been very beautiful,” Dyson said of his time at St. Mary of the Lake. “We got to sit down with them the first couple days to meet the families and they just told us their story and everything they’ve been through. It is crazy stuff.”

They also talked about how God has been providing for them along the way, he said.

“To be a small part of that — finding them housing — has been really cool,” Dyson said.

Being able to see how a parish carries out the social justice work of the church was impactful, Guidry said, as was the ministry of its pastor, Father Manny Dorantes.

“Father Manny has been inspiring to watch,” Guidry said. “His compassion for all the migrants and his passion for getting them out of the streets, fighting for humane ways of treating them and finding them places to be … watching him in his vocation living out the Gospel the way that he has, there’s been some good data points there.”

Lippert agreed.

“It’s been cool to see how Catholic social teaching and ministry to the poor can be done in an everyday diocesan parish setting,” he said. “It’s just encouraging to see how it can be done and how one could go about trying to set something up. I find that is something that’s underemphasized in my diocese’s parishes.”

Doing the immersion program at a parish instead of a non-profit gave him a window into the realities of priestly life, he said.

“Seeing the hard days, the long days, the copious amount of meetings, the people demanding your attention and language barriers and different cultures, there’s a lot of things a pastor deals with,” he said. “There was just the real, stark, not sugarcoated look at what priestly life is going to be like.”

He also saw the commitment to the social justice outreach from “a lot of solid laypeople,” he said, and the love they have for their priests and the church. 

Overall, CCHD’s seminary immersion program has been positive for the participants, said Ralph McCloud, the campaign’s director.

“They say that this is formative for them. That it is eye-opening. That it shed some light on experiences of folks that they would not have had had they not had this experience,” he said.

CCHD is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ anti-poverty campaign that awards grants on a local and national level to projects and organizations aimed at changing the social structures that perpetuate poverty.

The immersion program began in 2020 after bishops on the subcommittee for CCHD asked staff members to put together a program that would expose seminarians to people on the margins of society, to help the seminarians better serve marginalized people after they are ordained, McCloud said.

“They were seriously concerned about how the formation focused on a lot of things, but it did not focus on walking with and interacting with the poor on a very deliberate and intentional basis,” McCloud said. “If it happened, it happened accidentally and it seemed to be a bit of a project as opposed to part of their formation.”

CCHD works both with seminaries and dioceses on the immersion program and has had 45 seminarians take part in experiences of varying lengths. Staff members connect seminarians to CCHD-funded programs around the country to work with. 

Helping seminarians connect with marginalized people has a positive effect on the wider Catholic community, McCloud said.

“When we have more clergy who are ordained who have these experiences of walking with and accompanying low-income people in what Pope Francis invites us to do — encounter and accompany —when people can see the leaders of their parishes doing this, it encourages them to do it as well,” he said. “Beyond this, there is the whole idea of working with people of different faith communities that they would not have had if they hadn’t had this experience.”