CV NEWS FEED // Archbishop José Gomez led an interreligious memorial service for the deceased homeless persons in the city of Los Angeles, California last week, where he implored for the attendees “to see everyone as a child of God.”
The second annual Homeless Persons’ Interreligious Memorial took place at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on December 21.
According to news outlet Angelus News, near the “altar were 1,665 battery-charged candles, bearing the names of each of the people identified by the LA County coroner’s office as having died on the streets from December 2022 through Nov. 3 of this year.”
Attendees were encouraged to take a candle home after the service and pray for the person whose name was on the candle.
Religious leaders from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Orthodox, Bahá’í, Hindu, Jewish, and Mormon faith traditions spoke at the memorial and lit candles to honor the homeless who had died.
The memorial prayer service, Gomez said, was a call “to reach across the boundaries that separate us from our neighbors, to recognize in each person the spark of the divine, to see everyone as a child of God.”
“We need to bear one another’s burdens,” Gomez said. “We need to lift up our neighbors when they’ve fallen, bind their wounds, and find them a place to live. When one of us is suffering, we all suffer.”
After the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel was proclaimed at the service, Gomez said, “Jesus asks us tonight to see with ‘new eyes.’ He asks us to look at the ‘other’ and see a brother or a sister. Whatever the color of their skin, whatever their nationality, their language, or religion. Whatever their condition or their worldly status.”
More than 200 people attended the memorial, and were also encouraged after the service to donate sleeping bags, blankets, and other items.
The Society of St. Vincent de Paul Society and SOFESA, an LA nonprofit organization that cares for the homeless and low-income helped organize the vigil. Before the memorial, the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women also held a community donation drive called “Hearts & Hats” that collected scarves and hats for the homeless.
Council member Karen Akana told Angelus News, “It’s just remarkable that we have that many people on the streets who have passed away. It’s hard to believe that even tonight somebody is probably dying because it’s so cold outside. So we came down to pray for them.”
Angelus News noted that in 2022 Los Angeles had an estimated homeless population of 41,980, “making it the city with the largest homeless population in the country that year (that number grew to 46,260 this year). The number of homeless deaths in LA counted for this year’s memorial was over 200 more than the same time period in 2022.”
