Met with Deacon Bill Merrimen and Fr. Mark Dinardo at St. Patrick’s Church on the near west side of Cleveland. They have helped establish an extremely creative “Urban Plunge Program.” Fr. Dinardo has freed up a number of bedrooms in his rectory to house college students, deacons in training, church social action coordinators… for week long “emersion experiences” on the inner city streets. Tours are given to meet the homeless, and others, here. They sit across the lunch table from the homeless at St. Herman’s Shelter. They volunteer throughout the area, rubbing elbows with the working poor. They see the hard edge of the city, first hand… And in all that, some come back down to volunteer more; others go back to their suburbs, small towns, schools… to set up “Sister Church,” and the like, projects. Everybody wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Met with Deacon Bill Merrimen and Fr. Mark Dinardo at St. Patrick’s Church on the near west side of Cleveland. They have helped establish an extremely creative “Urban Plunge Program.” Fr. Dinardo has freed up a number of bedrooms in …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}