The Catholic Church’s Humanitarian Efforts in War-Ravaged Areas

Father John Jimenez is a Catholic priest, teacher, and missionary who belongs to the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. As a missionary, Father John Jimenez has served in two mission districts, one of which is in Sudan.

Sudan has had two civil wars. The first lasted from 1955 to 1972, while the second was fought from 1983 to 2005. Sudan has seen more wartime than peacetime since its independence as a nation. Fundamentally, these wars were fought between the northern and southern factions of the country. They were provoked by religious and tribal differences between these two regions.

Worldwide, many human rights abuses occur during wartime. People are displaced and become impoverished. The Catholic Church is often part of the humanitarian effort to help people who are affected by military conflict, sending missionaries to parts of the world ravaged by war, famine, and underdevelopment. Apart from building churches, these missionaries are also involved in infrastructure and social development, such as building schools and health centers. In Sudan, these efforts have included kindergarten programs for children, women’s education programs, and multipurpose centers in refugee camps.

The Way Forward: Live The Apostolic Truth and Aid the Dispossessed

Church People Believe Faith Religious

An alumnus of San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco, Father John Jimenez is a chaplain and math teacher at Archbishop Riordan High School. A priest at the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Father John Jimenez teaches Christians to resist what he calls “the expanding bubble of desire,” which is the pursuit of vainglory aiming to get a technological advantage over their neighbors. The desire to have a technological advantage over others, conquer more territory, and have geopolitical dominance is at the heart of the wars of the past, and the current manufactured pandemic

Today, technology and social media are feeding people’s desires and expanding a global bubble of desire. This leads people on a path of exploitation, where they use others as objects to get what they want. resulting in forces that displace people from their communities,
The Way forward is to embrace the way of spiritual poverty.
Here are some examples.
The Middle East, and East and Central Africa have for decades been displaced and in the middle of conflicts of greater economic powers. Here are projects that we can help

Catholic Near East Welfare Association www.cnewa.org
1011 First Ave
New York, NY 10022

assists in the education of seminarians at St Peter Seminary in Baghdad and the formation of novices of Dominican Sisters of St Catherine in Iraqi Kurdistan
assists the Mother of Mercy Clinic in Zerqa, Jordan
assists in food aid , blankets and kerosene heaters to Iraqi Refugees in Jordan
helps parishes in Haifa, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Tel Aviv
helps the Afro-Asian Migrant Center in Beirut, Lebanon
assists a religious community establish a poultry farm in Eritrea,
assists a special needs child care program in Ethiopia
assists the Syro Malabar Social Service Society help families affected by floods in India

To help the underground, persecuted church in China, please see the website of the Cardinal Kung Foundation

to help projects that I am involved in, please see SFSudanRelief.com on google sites or email me at jojimenez4@yahoo.com if you would like to help with a project for the poor in the Archdiocese of Guayaquil, Ecuador

Understanding Poverty of Spirit

With decades of experience in pastoral service, Father John Jimenez has served as a chaplain, parochial vicar, and teacher in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Throughout his homilies and the articles that he has written, Father John Jimenez focuses on spiritual solutions to society’s problems, such as encouraging a focus on poverty of spirit.

The term poverty of spirit comes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew 5:3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This first of the Beatitudes refers to complete dependence on God as the foundation and principle of existence.

Spiritual poverty may accompany a life of material poverty, but goes far beyond any lack of material goods. It means being free of attachment to anything that is not God.

Also called detachment, being poor in spirit opens one to the work of God because it means being empty of oneself and therefore open to being full of God just as the Blessed Virgin Mary emptied herself in order to bear Christ within her. Christ also gives us that example by taking on human nature, coming to serve and not to be served.