Making a Difference with Soup & Sandwiches

St. Ignatius parishioner finds God in serving others

by Kate Pipkin

     Sue Cesare remembers the first homeless person she ever helped. He was living under a highway overpass, and she had to climb over a railing and stumble down a hill to get to him. That was more than 20 years ago. Since then she has hit the streets of Baltimore regularly to help hundreds of the city’s homeless and hungry. When asked what inspires and motivates her to remain dedicated to such a seemingly hopeless population, her answer is matter-of-fact and short.

     “The Gospel.”

     In particular, the part of Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew that says, “I was hungry and you gave me food.” That’s the one that really keeps Cesare going.

     Realizing that the man she helped that night was just one of hundreds who needed food, Cesare decided to start a ministry called Loaves & Fishes. Within a few years it went from a handful of volunteers giving out sandwiches from the back of a van to a full-fledged independent ecumenical program operating every Saturday during winter months.

     Today, Loaves and Fishes is run by volunteers from six different religious institutions of various denominations, including St. Ignatius Church, where Cesare is a parishioner. In 2001, the parish council of St. Ignatius voted to adopt the program and provide a van for the Saturday night runs. The following year, the parish expanded Loaves & Fishes by offering to distribute food on Sundays.

     Now every Saturday and Sunday night during the winter, volunteers of the program prepare and distribute approximately 250 sandwiches and seven gallons of soup.
“Solidarity with the poor leads us on a journey toward becoming fully human,” says Cesare, a convert to Catholicism. “The poor have so much to teach us. When we forget the poor, we forget Yahweh.”

     Cesare attributes the success of the Loaves & Fishes program to the premise behind Ignatian spirituality of being “men and women for others,” and to teamwork, saying that people working together, with the same mission is the way to accomplish any major task.

     “[The volunteers] clearly get more out of it,” says Cesare. “We are fed spiritually.”

     Although she has befriended dozens of homeless men and women over the years, some stick out in her mind more than others. Take Lawrence, for instance. He lived in a doorway in south Baltimore surrounded by several large bags that contained all of his belongings. Lawrence had been there so long, he had become an icon of sorts in the neighborhood. One night as the Loaves & Fishes volunteers were unwrapping a sandwich for him, Lawrence told them he thought he was having a heart attack. When one of the volunteers started to call 911, Lawrence stopped her. Someone had already called an ambulance for him, but when it arrived Lawrence had sent it away because the attendants wouldn’t let him take all of his bags with him.

     “Well, we piled his bags into our van and took him to Mercy Hospital,” says Cesare. “It turns out he wasn’t having a heart attack – he had pneumonia. He was so grateful to us. He took his hat off, pulled a 10-dollar-bill out of it and told us to put in the collection basket at St. Ignatius Church.”

     Several years later Lawrence died. Cesare and some of her fellow volunteers called the city morgue and claimed his body.

     “We had a wonderful memorial Mass for him at St. Ignatius,” she said. “About 100 people showed up.”

     Cesare admits that some volunteers can get overwhelmed working with such a vulnerable population, but she seems to draw only energy and joy from the work.

     “It’s easy to think that what you do is so little,” she says. “But it makes a difference to the individuals you help. We learn who God is by serving others.”

Kate Pipkin is director or communications for the Maryland Province Jesuits