St. Anne parishioners see Extension’s work in action

Members of St. Anne Parish in Barrington have long been generous to the efforts promoted by the parish’s Faithjustice Committee as part of their Lenten almsgiving, and this year was no different.

The committee this year directed about $24,000 in donations to three projects supported by Catholic Extension: hurricane and earthquake recovery in Ponce, Puerto Rico; Proyecto Desarrollo Humano (Human Development Project) in Penitas, Texas; and migrant worker ministry in the Diocese of Yakima, Washington.

In July, St. Anne parishioners Paul and Adrienne Kalmes were able to join an immersion trip Catholic Extension hosted to Yakima during the cherry harvest to see what the project entails.

“We wanted to see how were the people being touched and what were the workers’ experiences and how were they being helped,” Paul Kalmes said.

Those on the trip, which included priests from the dioceses of Brooklyn, Atlanta and Seattle, saw the working relationship between the Diocese of Yakima and the Washington Farm Labor Association, a non-profit that acts as an intermediary between migrant workers and growers.

The visitors interacted most with Mexican workers with H-2A visas and U.S.-based workers who follow the harvest. Most were housed in hotels and received meals, said Paul Kalmes, calling it a step up for workers who in the past mostly lived in camps.

Adrienne Kalmes said the workers do not see themselves as victims.

“I found it uplifting, with all the negative press coverage that people from Mexico receive in the USA,” she said. “We would not be able to eat the way we do if were not for them and the labor they provide to this country. They have a tremendous sense of pride in the work they are doing as they harvest.”

“They work unbelievably hard,” Paul Kalmes said. “Their work ethic is totally astonishing, That’s why we have so much difficulty when the naysayers say we should be hiring all Americans to do that kind of work. We’ve tried and failed miserably.”

The Diocese of Yakima offers ministries including weekly Mass in the fields, religious education and sacramental preparation for workers and the Literacy Wagon, run by diocesan seminarians for the children of U.S.-based migrants.

Yakima Bishop Joseph Tyson spent time with visitors as part of his regular work with the migrants, the Kalmeses said.

“We watched him get down on the ground and play cards with a 5-year-old, then he was playing cornhole with the preteens and at night he was celebrating a wedding for two of the workers,” Adrienne Kalmes said.

In between, the bishop had the children make decorations for the wedding.

Another day, he got up at 3:30 a.m. to see off the workers who go to the fields at 4 a.m. At 7:30 that night, Bishop Tyson celebrated a Mass that included first Communion and confirmation for workers who do sacramental preparation in the evenings, she said.

The hotel banquet room was full of the workers’ friends holding up their smartphones.

“They were all Facetiming their families in Mexico,” Paul Kalmes said.

Most of the workers are able to keep in touch with family almost daily, Adrienne said, and most send nearly all their wages home after taxes and Social Security are deducted.

This is the second Catholic Extension immersion trip the Kalmeses have gone on, having traveled to Penitas, Texas, in 2018.

Working with Catholic Extension brought the efforts of St. Anne’s Faithjustice Committee closer to home. When it was founded in the 1990s, the committee worked with Catholic Relief Services’ Operation Rice Bowl. Then it started organizing its own projects, including a five-year effort to build schools in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“What we hoped to establish was a more direct connection with people on the ground,” Adrienne Kalmes said.

The parish did work with other organizations, including Nuestro Pequeños Hermanos in Central America.

“Our Faithjustice ministry at St. Anne was initially laid out to minister to the developing world. The international community was where our efforts were focused in many of our initial experiences. The plight of new migrants coming to this country, or people who would be in and out, is a new way of doing that.”

One exception was 2010, Paul Kalmes said, when many suburban residents lost their jobs in the recession and the parish supported the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

For now, the parish has found Catholic Extension to be an ideal partner.

“I think very few Catholics realize that there are 87 mission dioceses in the United States,” Adrienne Kalmes said. “These are dioceses that by definition can’t support themselves without outside help. We have in our own country the haves and the have-nots. … Somehow, Extension keeps coming up with the money they need to carry out their mission, and their mission has broadened. In the early days, it was to build church buildings. Now it’s building church communities. They are making those communities viable places to experience faith.”