Faithful urged to help those in need

Tagle said the faithful can do this by donating whatever they save from fasting to the Church’s ‘Fast2Feed’ campaign. (File Photo: Archdiocese of Manila – Office of Communications/Facebook)

MANILA — A top official of the Catholic Church encouraged the faithful to help feed children in need as part of their sacrifices during the Lenten season.

“This season of Lent, let us “re-center” our lives on God, who takes the initiative to call us to conversion. Let us deepen our relationship with him, by practicing charity and helping those in need,” Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle said in his pastoral letter for Ash Wednesday.

Tagle said the faithful can do this by donating whatever they save from fasting to the Church’s ‘Fast2Feed’ campaign.

“We hope to provide one hot and nutritious meal a day for 120 feeding days to at least 30,000 children. We appeal to your kind hearts. Please support Hapag-Asa. It only takes 1,220.00 for six months – or PHP10 per day – to nourish a hungry and undernourished child,” Tagle said.

Hapag-Asa, an integrated nutrition program of the Catholic Church, has helped in feeding more than 2 million hungry and malnourished children throughout the country.

To sustain its gains, it has also capacitated the children’s parents through values education, and skills and livelihood training.

The Cardinal noted that the Season of Lent is also the time for the faithful to reconcile and renew their faith.

“The Lenten season, which begins today, Ash Wednesday, is a time of mercy. It is an acceptable time to allow ourselves to be reconciled and to be renewed by the tenderness of the Father. It is a time given to us to trace our steps back to the path from which we strayed,” he said.

“Now, in her great wisdom, the church invites us to verify the quality of our Lenten commitment also in the light of charity. Indeed, it is charity that must shine above all and fill our hearts, because everything will end one day, with the exception of charity – a discreet, humble charity that does not make any noise to draw attention to itself, but works quietly and secretly. To practice charity is concrete proof that we are striving to follow Jesus, and that we are making the gift of ourselves the active principle of Christian life,” he added.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the Lenten season which will end on Easter Sunday.

On this day, the priest or a lay minister put a cross, using ashes on the foreheads of the faithful.

During Lent, Filipino Catholics pray and make sacrifices, including avoiding meat in their diet, among others.