Last week, we encouraged you to check out the I Hate Heroin and Never Use Alone FaceBook and web pages. Thanks to a posting on the York Opioid Collaborative's FB page, we have another resource for you. It's called Life Unites Us. As stated in the posting, "Everyone can promote recovery, whether you're part of the 50 percent of people who know someone with opioid use disorder or not. One easy way to help? Avoid using stigmatizing language and ask others to do the same". From their web page: "Together, we know our voices have the power to inform, the power to uplift, and the power to save lives". The link to the article is available in the Parish newsletter and on St. Mary's FaceBook page.

Our Daily Bread - Update It's time for casseroles again! Casserole pans will be made available for pickup after each Mass (while supplies last) on the weekend of January 8th and 9th. Since we need to limit our number of casseroles, please only use these pans. Please understand the importance of returning the frozen casseroles so that we can help ODB to serve their clients. We will be depending on everyone who takes a pan to return the frozen casseroles to the Parish freezer by Sunday, January 16th. You can find the recipes on the ODB Recipes 2017.doc link that is available in St.Mary's weekly Newsletter. Just choose a recipe, follow the recipe as it is written, double wrap the casserole with foil, label it with the type of casserole and the date, and freeze it. If you choose to do a mac + cheese casserole, please be sure to follow ODB's mac + cheese recipe. Please do not include ham or any meat. The frozen casseroles must be placed in the Parish freezer by January 16th. We'll also collect any homemade face masks that you'd like to donate. If you have any questions, please contact Bob at crhoopert@zoominternet.net

I Hate Heroin (I Have Hope) is a community of people joined together in the battle to overcome addiction. Their FaceBook page contains a posting from The Riverfront Times which is a free weekly newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. The article discusses a harm reduction resource called Never Use Alone. The program runs a toll-free, 24/7 hotline (800-484-3731) that connects substance users from all over the U.S. and Canada with volunteer operators. The concept of radical compassion involves going out of your way to save the lives of total strangers. Please check out and share the IHH and the Never Use Alone FB pages. They will be uplifting for anyone suffering from or in recovery from SUDs and for their loved ones. And they may help you to save a life. The link to the article is available in the Parish newsletter and on St. Mary's FaceBook page.

It's time for casseroles again! Casserole pans will be made available for pickup after each Mass (while supplies last) on the weekend of January 8th and 9th. Since we need to limit our number of casseroles, please only use these pans. Please understand the importance of returning the frozen casseroles so that we can help ODB to serve their clients. We will be depending on everyone who takes a pan to return the frozen casseroles to the Parish freezer by Sunday, January 16th. You can find the recipes on the ODB Recipes 2017.doc link that is available in St.Mary's weekly Newsletter. Just choose a recipe, follow the recipe as it is written, double wrap the casserole with foil, label it with the type of casserole and the date, and freeze it. If you choose to do a mac + cheese casserole, please be sure to follow ODB's mac + cheese recipe. Please do not include ham or any meat. The frozen casseroles must be placed in the Parish freezer by January 16th. We'll also collect any homemade face masks that you'd like to donate. If you have any questions, please contact Bob at crhoopert@zoominternet.net.

Last week, numerous news outlets covered the U.S. Surgeon General's report on the current dangers to our children's mental health. As stated in the Washington Post's article, “Suicide already was the second leading cause of death for children. We had already seen pretty high levels of substance use, depression and violent behavior. But the pandemic has been a perfect storm of a stressor, which we know leads to really notable increases in psychological symptoms among kids.” If our children are in pain and they don't get help, they may look for ways to numb their pain via suicide, self-harming, or self-medicating. The link to the article is available in the Parish newsletter and on St. Mary's FaceBook page.

Thanks to everyone who donated groceries and gift cards for our Thanksgiving and Christmas Holiday Food Projects. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the special collections that St. Mary's uses to pay for the Saubel's grocery vouchers for our assigned families. And thanks to everyone who signed up as volunteers and participated in our sorting and distributing events. We hope you all have a very blessed Christmas!

Our next distribution of casserole pans will be held on January 8th and 9th, 2022. If you have any questions, please contact Bob at crhoopert@zoominternet.net.

Hopefully, everyone has heard of Fentanyl. As stated in the NYT's article, "The synthetic opioid fentanyl, a legal prescription pain medication, is now a black-market commodity blasting through the street drug marketplace. Cheap and up to 100 times more powerful than naturally derived opioids, it is also lethal". As we previously shared with you, the majority of the record-breaking number of overdose deaths that occurred in the 12-month period that ended in April were linked to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. The article provides a thorough history of fentanyl's rise over the past 25 years. The link to the article is available in the Parish newsletter and on St. Mary's FaceBook page.

Christmas Food Project 2021 For our upcoming Christmas Holiday Food Project, we’re going to continue using the Parish hall for sorting (December 17th at 7:00pm) and distributing (December 18th at 9:00am) the groceries. All of our volunteers must have completed either the Virtus or the Worthy of the Call training. If you haven’t already submitted your name to Bob at crhoopert@zoominternet.net, please do it now. If Barbara Sadler isn’t able to verify that you’ve been trained, you will not be included in our list of volunteers and you will not be able to help sort or distribute the groceries. St. Mary’s will continue to provide vouchers to each of families that are assigned to us by Mason-Dixon Community Services. The vouchers are funded by the special collections that St. Mary’s takes up for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. The vouchers will be redeemable at the local Saubel’s store in Whiteford. We will be collecting groceries for Christmas before each Mass on the weekend of December 11th and 12th. As we did last year under COVID, we are not going to distribute grocery bags with the colorful tags with the needed grocery items. We’re going to follow the process that worked successfully for us last year. Please purchase the grocery items that are listed based on the 1st initial of your last name: Initials A through F – CANNED FRUIT / PEANUT BUTTER / FRUIT JUICE / HOT CEREAL / LAUNDRY DETERGENT / PAPER TOWELS Initials G through L - DISH SOAP / JELLY / CANNED TUNA / FRUIT JUICE / TOILET PAPER / TOOTHPASTE Initials M through S – COLD CEREAL / CANNED FRUIT / CANNED TUNA / SHAMPOO / TOILET PAPER / LAUNDRY DETERGENT Initials T through Z - JELLY / PEANUT BUTTER / COLD CEREAL / CANNED VEGETABLES / DISH SOAP / TOOTHPASTE Please do not donate anything that isn’t listed above. And please do not donate any food items that are past their expiration dates. We hope to see you before each of the Masses on the 11th and 12th. Thank you so much for helping to feed some of our local families who are in need.

Prevention and Recovery Ministry We were going to share information about Fentanyl this week. But then an interesting commentary showed up in the Baltimore Sun. As stated in the commentary: "Dentists are the sixth-highest prescribers of opioids in the United States and the highest prescribers of opioids to patients between the ages of 10 and 19 years old — the age group at the highest risk of developing opioid use disorder". Efforts are underway to inform dentists, doctors, and other health care providers about the dangers of opioids and the various alternative ways that are available to manage their patients' pain. The link to the article is available in the Parish newsletter and on St. Mary's FaceBook page. If you have any questions or if there are any SUD-related subjects that you are interested in learning more about, please contact Bob at crhoopert@zoominternet.net