The St. Vincent De Paul Meal Program, located at the junction of 10th Street and Madison, is designed to feed the hungry in the area. There are all kinds of people who come in for food: young and old, new faces as well as those who have come many times before, those who truly need the food, and those who come only for the free food. However, all are given a good meal and a chance to get inside, especially important in the bitter winter cold. The meal program feeds many people, often averaging at three hundred fifty people or more. And because they feed so many people, much preparation must go into making all of the food and serving it to the people who come.
Much of the food that St. Vincent De Paul Meal Program gives out is either donated or must be bought. Some of the food is brought in by people from the neighborhood parishes, some by schools having students do volunteer service. Not all of the volunteer work is done by parishioners or students, though. Aside from having a full time staff, the meal program employs people who are on welfare, and only by doing this work will these people receive their welfare checks.
The meal program addresses many injustices in the city of Milwaukee. The meal program provides for a relief for people who have not had their fair share of things, who have either directly or indirectly been cheated by society. The issue of distributive justice plays a key role in this situation. The people served by the meal program are victims of an inequitable distribution of goods and materials and ideas and ideals throughout society. These people have been left out, and therefore they cannot find a way to express themselves in society, and so their contributive justice is weakened also. These people are given food and drink at the meal program, so that they can try to get back on their feet to become decent productive members of society, and they can return to a more equitable contributive justice.
Commutative justice plays an important part in the meal program, because it is all about people interacting with other people. Underprivileged people and those who have their share come together, and see each other face to face. This helps the person who is doing well to realize the conditions that many people face in this world today. There are people serving the hungry, who interact with them. The kindness of a person thanking you for pouring them a glass of milk or a cup of coffee shows you that like you, they are real people, not just images in a newspaper article or statistics in a record book. These are people, and have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else, but who have an even greater difficulty achieving those hopes and dreams because of their situations. However, they struggle on, enduring the hardships that so many people never face and never know of. That is, unless they do volunteer service work like this.
This program relates to the one important message that Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel: to love your neighbor as you love yourself. The people who work at the meal program follow this very closely, for if they were in the same situation, they would want to be helped. This also relates to the parable which Jesus told of the last judgment, when Jesus told the goats that when they did not feed or clothe or help in any way any of the least of his servants, they did not do anything for Him, and the sheep did unknowingly do these things for Jesus by helping out the poor and unfortunate. The meal program also relates to many of the messages of the Church regarding helping out the poor, both messages from the Church's past as well as messages of the present, like those of the US Catholic Bishops.
As to effectiveness, this program has mixed results. In the short term, it is quite effective and accomplishes its goal: to feed the hungry. However, it is not as effective in the long term, because it does not address the long term needs of a person, such as a home and a career. However, it is not completely ineffective, since it does give the people the opportunity to spend more of their time looking for jobs if they lack them and less time worrying about what or if they will eat their next meal.
I have many thoughts from the eight hours I spent. I had been to the St. Vincent De Paul Meal Program before, and so I knew the routine of how things work there. When I got there each day, I helped prepare the dining hall and helped in the kitchen. When the people started arriving, I was one of the people to bring milk and coffee to people. I looked around as more people came into the hall, and sure enough, I noticed that there were several familiar faces: I had seen these people before, in the springtime, when I was doing service work for my Confirmation. There were many new faces too, and probably many who had been there in the spring but whom I didn't notice in particular. Of all the people there, I can say that there is no one defining characteristic which can be used to describe all of them; all of them are different and individual. They are not all the stereotypical streetperson, in fact, many of them were just normal people. But for one reason or another, these people were all hungry. And so they came here to eat. I saw that they had in much as common with me as they had with each other. I learned that justice is not something served in a criminal court, but something shared between people.
In the end, I learned something about myself and about society. People are all the same, but all individual, and no person is any less of a person than another, no matter what his situation might be. I learned that for society to work, justice must be found everywhere and given to everyone. This justice experience of going to the St. Vincent De Paul Meal Program helped to shape my view of people and of justice, and it has helped to change my way of thinking, knowing that whatever I do, someone else will be affected, either for the better or for the worse.