Twenty young adult women and men with Christ in the City, a Catholic organization of missionaries, are continuing their outreach in Philadelphia and living together in community under a new director.
Ana Salazar says that the faith and community that they are living out is being cultivated into love poured into the streets of the city, particularly with people who endure homelessness and poverty in all its forms.
“(They) have been experiencing the poverty of loneliness,” Salazar said.
“God didn’t give us his love to be an insular kind of love. It’s meant to be continued to be poured out. And so simultaneously we’re forming our missionaries and we’re giving them an opportunity to go out and to build relationships with those who have not been experiencing friendship or good relationships in the past, and treating this poverty with loneliness.”
Christ in the City is empowering these young adults not only to support Philadelphia’s unhoused and under-resourced people, but also to build a life in their own intentionally Catholic community that fosters their Catholic faith and forms them as Christian disciples.
Salazar has been part of Christ in the City for many years, though only in Philadelphia for a few months in her new role. She spent a few months last summer here as well while serving in Christ in the City’s other hub city of Denver.
“I grew up alongside the missionaries there, going to lunches in the parks, and getting to know the missionaries and the staff,” she said. “It’s just this juxtaposition between the radical and the simple. That just strikes you.”
The most visible sign of Christ in the City’s presence happens in a similar setting every Wednesday at noon, when they descend upon the lawn near the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Center City and unleash brotherly love and sisterly affection in Christ through their Lunch in the Park outreach program.
They spend an hour serving lunch to those enduring physical hunger, which often becomes a launch point for connection and much longer time spent getting to know people, listening to their vulnerabilities, and letting God work through them to love where it’s needed.
“You go to lunch in the park and you see missionaries pulling out guitars and singing with people. You see them giving haircuts to our friends, or you see them having little dance parties, or you see them singing or cracking the most random jokes,” Salazar said.
“If you’re a passerby, you’d say, ‘What are you doing here? What are you solving?’ And as soon as you invite people into that, they see, we’re just all people. We’re hanging out. We’re just enjoying the fact that we’re friends, we’re called to be friends. We’re called to be in this community.”
Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez and missionaries from Christ in the City gather outside the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul on Sept. 9 before the organization’s weekly Lunch in the Park outreach.
Both Salazar and Christian Narin, who works in personal formation with the Christ in the City team, realize that this form of ministry doesn’t solve the quantifiable temporal poverty they face. But they recognize that the unquantifiable need for connection and hope can loom even larger for people in the long run.
Narin said someone told him that Christ in the City’s outreach is “the most inefficient program when it comes to numbers.”
“What we do is just to go to the streets, to love people, to talk,” he said. ”Sometimes the missionaries will be (there) two hours with the same person. We are not counting numbers or how many people we help to get housing or get resources. We help people just to feel loved, and we try to help to restore their dignity.”
The missionaries Salazar and Narin help lead come from different backgrounds and locations, as far away as Colorado, Maine and Texas as well as the Philadelphia area. They are giving one or two years of their lives to the mission. Some are cradle Catholics, and some are recent converts.
“They’re so unified in the fact that the Lord in some providential way has led them here. And so talking with the missionaries, they’re all just assured in the fact that they’re meant to be here. And they’re excited to learn to see the why,” Salazar said.
“We call the community the school of love. Here are 20 missionaries from all these different walks of life. And they’re praying together, they’re learning together, they’re living together and they’re experiencing new things together.”
Salazar recognizes that Christ in the City’s mission to be present to the unloved responds to the Church’s call for missionary discipleship by forming young people on fire for their mission.
“Every single person that steps in front of us,” Salazar said, “is an opportunity to love.”
Click here for ways to help Christ in the City’s Philadelphia ministry.
Share this story