Rome café responds to Pope’s plea for solidarity with poor

(Vatican Radio) The managers of a café near the Vatican have responded to Pope Francis’ invitation to reach out to the poor and disenfranchised.

Together with the pontifical parish of St. Anne, they will help prepare a dinner tonight for about one hundred of Rome’s poor. "These are people I meet every day on the street and in the parish of St. Anne where they go to seek help” says Msgr . Francesco Gioia, chairman of the Peregrinatio ad Petri Sedem, an office of the Roman Curia and one of the organizers of tonight’s solidarity dinner. “They are the homeless and needy who often offer poignant testimonies of humility, who rely on God and live on little and yet have so much to teach us all."

Archbishop Gioia has been organizing similar dinners for the past twenty years, involving generous Roman families who for an evening, welcome the poor and destitute into their homes and offer them a hot meal.

Monday’s dinner will be offered by the Moretto café, and the Archbishop explains, aims to be a moment of friendship and “fraternal sharing” for the many people that the parish’s Caritas volunteers help throughout the year.

Many of them , says the parish priest, Father Bruno Silvestrini, come knocking at the door of the Augustinian community and parish offices to ask for financial and moral support. Among the guests attending tonight’s dinner will also be Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, Pope Francis’ alms chaplain. (Source: VR Italian)