Food and Faith for the Elmont Community

Pope Francis Hospitality Center has been feeding the hungry for two years

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It had been an hour since the sun rose in Elmont, but the normally vacant parking lot of the St. Vincent De Paul Elementary School in Elmont was quickly filling up. The halls of the school have not echoed with students’ voices since the last bell rang in 1994, yet there was shouting and banging coming from the basement.

There, a commercial kitchen was in operation, serving breakfast for roughly 25 people who decided to come early, before the main course at noon. No one uses the term homeless. The people that come to the Pope Francis Hospitality Center for a meal are simply clients.

“We’re expecting close to 100 people today,” said Mary Joesten, co-founder of Faith Mission, the organization that runs the center, on the grounds of the St. Vincent De Paul church and rectory.

Every Saturday for the past two years, people from all over Long Island have joined Joesten and her staff of volunteers for a meal. Most are from the Elmont area, but there are people from Long Beach as well, and as far away as Islip.

“I think they’re very happy, the ones that come,” said Joesten. “I want to make everyone’s life a little easier.”

She started cooking meals for the less fortunate in Jamaica, Queens, in 1969 with her late husband, Ed. After he died, Joesten became acquainted with Monsignor Rick Figliozzi, who ran Our Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Freeport, and they began a community outreach program there in 1995.

In 2011, the Diocese of Rockville Center appointed Figliozzi the administrator of St. Vincent De Paul, and he asked Joesten to set up a similar program for his new parish, which opened in the winter of 2013.

“Human contact and support gives people hope to get through a rough patch in their life,” Figliozzi said. “Whether a person is Catholic or not, they’re human beings, and Jesus’s outreach was to everyone.”

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