Catholic group helps parishes to share a table with the poor, following pope’s example

ROME (OSV News) — When Pope Leo XIV sat down to lunch with people experiencing homelessness and poverty at Castel Gandolfo this month, he offered a model that one Catholic organization says any parish can follow.

Fratello, a French Catholic nonprofit active in roughly 40 countries, has made it its mission to aid dioceses, parishes and associations in organizing “Banquets of Friendship” and prayer vigils that bring the poor together with their local Christian communities.

Founded in 2016 during the Jubilee of Mercy, Fratello focuses its efforts in assisting parishes in organizing their own local celebrations of the Church’s annual World Day of the Poor.

“The mission of Fratello is, as Pope Francis said, to meet the poorest and to work with them, and to put the poor at the center of the Church — to have an event of prayer and spirituality not for the poor, but with the poor, inside the Church,” said Aymard Leclercq, the organization’s vice president, in an interview with OSV News in Rome.

The World Day of the Poor, celebrated every year on the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, falls this year on Sunday, Nov. 15. When Pope Francis established the observance at the end of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy in 2016, he wrote that he hoped the day would serve as a genuine form of new evangelization.

“It would be a day to help communities and each of the baptized to reflect on how poverty is at the very heart of the Gospel and that, as long as Lazarus lies at the door of our homes (cf. Lk 16:19-21), there can be no justice or social peace,” he said.

Fratello’s role, Leclercq said, is to help parishes and dioceses translate that vision into something concrete each November. “The mission for Fratello is to organize one day specifically for the World Day of the Poor … to help all of the parishes, the community in the world, to organize and to live with this event every year,” he said.

For the 10th anniversary of the observance this year, Fratello is promoting a format built around four elements that parishes can adapt to their own needs:

• A Vigil of Mercy on Saturday, featuring adoration, testimonies and the sacrament of reconciliation.
• A Mass for the World Day of the Poor on Sunday, celebrated with the poor in their communities.
• A Friendship Banquet, a shared meal bringing together people in vulnerable situations with volunteers and parishioners.
• A worldwide prayer via videoconference, a roughly 30-minute gathering that links communities across continents in real time.

Parishes can host all four elements or choose to take part only in one, Leclercq said. Fratello assists with logistics, communication tools and connecting communities with others already doing similar work. “We promote to organize banquets, friendship banquets, so we help the community to organize it and to make the logistics,” he said.

What began in France has since spread to roughly 40 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, including Chile, Cameroon and the Philippines, Leclercq said. “We are not able to visit all of the countries, all of the communities,” he said, “but we can in fact organize a pilgrimage of Our Lady of Tenderness.”

That pilgrimage centers on a statue blessed by Pope Francis in 2023. About 30 replicas of Our Lady of Tenderness are currently traveling worldwide, visiting prisons, elderly care homes, schools and parishes, offering communities a chance to gather in prayer even when a Fratello representative cannot visit in person.

Leclercq said the experience of encountering the poor has shaped his own faith. “I think for me, the main thing is that with contact with the poor, we understand that we are all poor and we all need spirituality,” he said, adding that the poor have much to teach those who take the time to listen.

Fratello’s work echoes the spirit of Pope Leo’s July 11 lunch with the poor in the Vatican Gardens at Castel Gandolfo, where the pope told his lunch guests that he arrived without a prepared speech but “with hunger. A hunger for justice, hunger for genuine charity, hunger for a Church that truly knows how to open its doors, to welcome and receive everyone.”

“Today, we would like to build a bridge with all of you,” the pope said. “This is the Church we want to be.”

According to the Laudato Si’ Center, the “Lunch with the Pope” in Castel Gandolfo is set to become an annual tradition, with a different diocese invited each year to bring people living in poverty, refugees and migrants to experience the setting and meet the pope. Pope Leo has also continued Pope Francis’ custom of sharing lunch with the poor each year in November on the World Day of the Poor.

Fratello was founded after a 2016 pilgrimage that brought several thousand homeless people and their companions to Rome for an encounter with the pope.

Nearly a decade later, the organization’s goal could be described by Pope Leo’s words July 11, “Whenever we come together, whenever we share this spirit of encounter around the same table — the one table where Jesus is also present with us — we are truly building a different world: a world of hope, a world that is light.”

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