A day spent volunteering with Canisius Chaplain Fr. Fred Betti, SJ
By Ava C. Green, Editor-in-Chief
“We’re going to where Buffalo’s Galleria Mall was in the 1940s and 50s. This Broadway-Fillmore district used to be famous. Remember, I’m 67 years old, so when I was a little kid, it was when all these neighborhoods were failing – things were changing. Suddenly, it was like, ‘Nope!’,” said Canisius University’s Chaplain, Father Fred Betti, SJ, with an exaggerated “-ope.” “‘Cause everything went to the ‘burbs and started to look like what we see now.”
Where we were going on that cold, grey, November morning was the Response to Love Center (RTLC), in the eye of Buffalo's East Side storm, where Fr. Betti spends his time from about 7 a.m to noon, Monday through Thursday. There, he serves the poor – sometimes it’s personally checking in with those lowly in spirit, sometimes it’s saying mass for the meek of heart; but mostly, it’s in a hairnet and apron at the RTLC.
The Response to Love Center is a non-profit organization aimed at providing education, care, “hope, healing and peace to the poor and marginalized of society,” according to their website. Their mission, as well as Fr. Betti’s, is to provide services to those in need while maintaining people’s dignity. They do not patronize members; rather, they uplift, accompany and prepare people for success.
“So part of my job at Canisius is to bring the students to all the places like this to teach them. We call it service learning. So that's where I started my work on the East Side.”
Jesuits like Fr. Betti at Canisius University make three vows: chastity, obedience and poverty. They don't own anything personally and agree to live in a community – typically, where they’ve committed themselves to serving. Fr. Betti, being a first hand witness to the decline in the quality of life on the East end of Buffalo, decided to center his service efforts there.
He greeted the line of people that have been waiting at the door of the RTLC – some of them as early as an hour before they start serving at 9 a.m. – for what’s likely their only hot meal of the day, making small talk and remembering the tiniest details of their lives.
He chatted with the RTLC members as they made their way through, and with the other volunteers, like Ann Marie, who had been volunteering there for about three years. “He just has all the energy in the world,” she said of Fr. Betti. “This is an everyday behavior for him. It’s his real day. It’s real. He’s real.”
Members of the RTLC are able to come in during operating hours and take what is being given out that day, free of charge. Fr. Betti agonizes over the fact that the sisters have to spend the weekend tracking and replenishing inventory, and can’t give out food those days; the thought that many of them won’t eat another meal until Monday keeps him up at night, so he does all he can at the center during the day.
In the basement of the RTLC, the sisters passed out food to the people who are registered at the center; but Fr. Betti mans the market table next to the hot food stations, where they cycle out different items that they give for free to people who stop by – sometimes fresh fruits, sometimes vegetables, paper products or sanitary products. That day, it was carrots, celery, collard greens, tomatoes and broccoli heads.
That day the sisters handed out halved wraps and servings of soup that were left over from an event the night before at a local church, but most of the meals are made by the sisters, with groceries supplied by local organizations or bought with proceeds that the center receives. Ingredients are stored in large industrial freezers that were installed during a complete updating of the center in 2021, and they have rooms set up upstairs to look like grocery stores where people can bring home food to make when the center is closed.
The market table wouldn’t be offering winter gloves that were donated by a local manufacturer until the next day, but when a man – weathered by what seemed like more than just old age – said he needed gloves that day, and that his hands were still shaking from the cold, Fr. Betti threw his vow of obedience to the wind and got the man gloves. He had noticed that the man left a cart of bottles outside of the church when he came in to eat. Knowing the man would be on his way to return bottles to make money, and knowing the closest bottle return was almost a mile away, Fr. Betti said, “It’d be a sin not to get him some gloves.”
In what used to be a gymnasium at the RTLC, are perfectly organized, painstakingly color-coded Christmas toys, children’s clothing, outerwear and home essentials to be given to people in need on the East Side. On top of organizing and distributing these items, Fr. Betti somehow manages to do even more for people in his personal time.
“That’s part of my vocation as a Jesuit. You know, we're called to be with the poor, but I get so angry when I see how these people are being victimized and abused. Why should they have to live like that?”
He finds jobs and resources for people in need. He takes those without cars to grocery stores and doctor’s appointments. He visits the most dilapidated houses, filled with far too many people. He lives out the Jesuit value of cura personalis – care for the whole person – and refuses to stand idly by while his community suffers.
“I’m not scared of anything,” he said, “But it’s sad to see how some people are forced to live. The word that Ignatius used when he gathered the first men who became Jesuits was ‘compañeros’ – companions. I’m there just to be with the people, you know, so they know they’re not alone.”