HCH photo by Darlene Dela Cruz
David Coleman, Hawaii director of Catholic Relief Services
David Coleman represents one degree of separation between Hawaii’s Catholics and 100 million poor people around the world. It is a link the Chaminade University of Honolulu religious studies professor would like to bolster.
Last year, Bishop Larry Silva appointed Coleman as the Hawaii director of Catholic Relief Services, “the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic Church in the United States.”
CRS promotes human development among more than 100 million people in nearly 100 countries by responding to major emergencies, fighting disease and poverty and nurturing peaceful and just societies.
It is a volunteer position for Coleman, who is Chaminade’s dean of humanities and fine arts. He has responded with efforts to propagate a larger volunteer effort throughout the diocese — especially during Lent.
Lent is the season CRS employs to reach out to America’s Catholics, inviting them to live their faith in solidarity with the world’s poor.
“Developing the virtue of solidarity with the poor, wherever they are, is fundamental to our vision of faith, of who we are as an international church,” Coleman said.
During the Lenten season, CRS does this through the appealing, accessible and easy-to-use Operation Rice Bowl.
At first glance, Operation Rice Bowl, with its colorful square cardboard “bowls” with the money slot on top, is simply a spare-change collection campaign, a personal “poor box.”
But it is much more than that, said Coleman. Almsgiving is only one-third of the objectives of Rice Bowl.
The other aims of the program are the two other traditional Christian spiritual practices of “prayer” and “fasting.”
“This is a way we can respond fully, joined together in prayer, fasting and almsgiving,” Coleman said. “It is critical that we start with prayer.”
Rice Bowl is a way “to enliven Lent as a process of transformation of a person by giving to the poor,” he said. “But in the end, the most powerful thing we’ll do is prayer. With the rest of the church, we join in international prayer.”
Motivated by the Gospel of Jesus, Catholic Relief Services provides more than simple humanitarian aid, Coleman said. Its purpose is “changing lives and transforming people in the name of God who loves us.”
“God loved us first,” he said, which makes it possible and necessary to love others.
Coleman is using his position at Chaminade and his mandate from Bishop Silva to CRS’s advantage.
Last Saturday, he invited representatives from Hawaii’s parishes and schools to a “Celebration Day” at Chaminade to “pray together” and learn more about Catholic Relief Services.
One of Coleman’s goals this year is to establish a CRS contact in every parish and every Catholic school in Hawaii.
He has also organized 20 CRS student “ambassadors” from Chaminade’s parish scholarship recipients who have agreed to do community service through campus ministry.
Coleman is training them to promote CRS’s efforts on campus and eventually to work two-by-two with local parish communities.
This month he will travel with two of the students, Amber Alvarez of the Big Island and Joanna
Ching of Kauai, for training in justice issues at the Young Leaders Initiative at the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C.
The involvement of local young people in the work of CRS is not a national initiative. “We are inventing it” with the encouragement of the national CRS, Coleman said.
The Chaminade professor said the effort should not only help CRS, but will benefit the church overall by encouraging its youth to practice the “virtue of solidarity.”
“This is a positive way of bringing youth to connect with the sacramental life of the church,” he said.
Young people can attract other young people by engaging their “hearts, minds and bodies” in the social, liturgical, charitable and justice work of the church, Coleman said.
CRS, with its 5,000 workers across the globe, helps Americans create conscious relationships with the poor in the world as it “creates structures that can systematically partner with them long term,” Coleman said. “You empower people to change themselves over time.”
“The same process takes part locally as well,” he said, as “we build communities that accept our task of working for justice and the transformation of our world.”
“How do you bring about awareness? By recognizing the goodness you’ve been blessed with and by participating in other people’s lives,” he said.
