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When they learned from a member of the board of education that local school children were returning from summer vacation thinner than when they left, parishioners of Ss. Peter and Paul in Cumberland wanted to do something about it. Working with members of nearby Emmanuel Episcopal Church, they came up with an innovative lunch box program that gets healthy food into the stomachs of hungry children. Five days a week during the summer, volunteers pack about 150 lunches that are left in a cooler at a popular playground where children take the sandwiches, apples and bananas without feeling embarrassed. The unique outreach, now entering its fourth year, is just one component of Ss. Peter and Paul’s St. Anthony Place, a growing service ministry that celebrated its 10th anniversary Jan. 7.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (CNS) — Retired Bishop Fernando Lugo Mendez of San Pedro, Paraguay, who resigned from active ministry to run for president, said he hopes to foster a “great social pact” to achieve national reconciliation in a country with deep divisions. “I believe in collective leadership. … I’m no messiah,” Bishop Lugo, who is leading in opinion polls, told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview in mid-January. “Paraguay has a lot of very qualified people.”

WASHINGTON (CNS) – A pro-life official of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops criticized House passage Jan. 11 of a bill that would expand federal funding of stem-cell research that involves the destruction of human embryos, but expressed confidence that an expected presidential veto of the “misguided and unethical legislation” would stand. Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said in a statement that the 253-174 vote indicated that there were not enough votes to override the veto that President George W. Bush has promised.

LOS ANGELES (CNS) – The message that women are worth more than their appearance, social status or monetary income is something that Catholic author Cheryl Dickow has tried to get across in her nonfiction books and now hopes also to do through fiction writing. The author of “Reclaiming Your Christian Self in a Secular World: A Woman’s Bible Study” and “Raising Christian Children in a Secular World: Christian Parenting,” has started a new publishing company, Bezalel Books, to address the dearth of women’s Catholic fiction.

WASHINGTON (CNS) – Catholic Charities USA Jan. 10 launched an ambitious campaign to cut poverty in America in half by 2020. “The poor do belong to us. … They are our brothers and sisters,” Father Larry Snyder, Catholic Charities USA president, told an overflow crowd at a Capitol Hill briefing announcing the Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America. Noting that 37 million Americans – 12.6 percent of the population – currently live below the poverty line, he said Catholic Charities USA and its affiliates, working in partnership with government, the private sector and other nonprofits, will launch “a concentrated, systematic effort to cut poverty in half by 2020.”