CSS Outreach Offices

By Katie Patrick

Last week, my husband and I took turns driving our 3-year-old twin daughters – Keira and Saoirse – to Craoi na Tire Studio of Irish Dance in Omaha for a beginner’s summer dance camp.

Since March, the twins have been asking for Irish music to be played as they dance “jigs” and “reels” around the house, having seen the dancers perform at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade and at the Hooley, an annual celebration of Irish culture organized by the Omaha chapter of Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians. If Riverdance comes to mind as you read this, you’re not far off.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is rooted in compassion—a deep awareness of the suffering of others, joined with the desire to relieve it. Recently, Catholic Social Services Imperial/St. Isidore Gift & Thrift and the Imperial community wholeheartedly answered the call to embrace the needs of others with compassion. Read all about it in our latest # HopeintheGoodLife newsletter (and learn how you can support their work and double your support through the Chase County Challenge!)

By Katie Patrick

When Francis Oleru boarded a plane in Nigeria with his pregnant wife and four children, he was stepping into the unknown. Without a prior visit, the medical laboratory scientist accepted a job at Chase County Community Hospital in Imperial, Neb. He knew America could offer his children the safety, security and opportunity that Nigeria couldn’t, and so with faith that God would provide, he and his family set off on their new adventure in rural southwest Nebraska.

Of all the places in America they could continue their medical careers, two men from Nigeria found themselves building new lives in Imperial—a small town in southwestern Nebraska, surrounded by farmland and prairie, and a world away from home. Discover how Francis Oleru and Aloysius Aleke came to embrace this rural community as their own, and how Catholic Social Services helped weave their two journeys into one shared new beginning.

By Katie Patrick

Because the poor were fed, clothed and sheltered at a personal sacrifice, the pagans used to say about the Christians, “See how they love each other.”

In our own day the poor are no longer fed, clothed, sheltered at a personal sacrifice, but at the expense of the taxpayers.

And because the poor are no longer fed, clothed and sheltered, the pagans say about the Christians “See how they pass the buck.”

These striking words from Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, are just as relevant today as when he first spoke them nearly a century ago.