“Are you leaving, too?"
The question, said Abena Amedormey – country representative for Catholic Relief Services in the west African nation of Ghana – came to CRS workers as they visited communities they serve after a January 2025 freeze on all U.S. foreign aid.
By July 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development – established in 1961, and which in 2024 provided $187 million in humanitarian funding to Ghana – effectively ceased to exist, with 85% of its programs cut. The result was that many in-country aid organizations also ceased operations.
But not CRS. They're surviving – yet the deep slashes to USAID funding have now made their annual Rice Bowl collection more essential than ever.
A familiar Lenten program of Catholic Relief Services – the official relief and development agency of the Catholic Church in the U.S. – CRS Rice Bowl offers faith communities in every diocese throughout the United States the opportunity to put their faith into action.
Since 1975, the titular rice bowl – a brightly colored, cardboard almsgiving box that's a familiar annual Lenten sight in parishes nationwide – has invited Catholics to pray, fast, and give in solidarity with the world's poor.
Some 11,000 Catholic parishes and schools will participate in 2026, including those in the Diocese of Allentown, where Rice Bowl began.
Launched by Monsignor Robert Coll as a local effort in the Diocese of Allentown, the campaign became a national initiative through its introduction at the Philadelphia-based 41st International Eucharistic Congress in 1976, and its subsequent adoption by the U.S. bishops through CRS.
For more information on CRS Rice Bowl, go to www.crsricebowl.org.
By OSV News
Photo by OSV News photo/Benny Manser, Catholic Relief Services.
