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For the second week in a row, I have seen a desperate call for help from Catholic Charities Community Services. The social service agency that helps more people out of poverty, as refugees and in a family crisis than one sentence can adequately describe, has a critical need for new foster parents.

Help Catholic Charities temporarily care for a child in state custody.

Teens, sibling groups and children of different ethnic backgrounds are currently in state custody and awaiting a loving family and home, no matter how long their stay, according to the announcement in the St. Louis the King Parish bulletin.

The requirements seem extremely easy. Prospective foster parents must:

• be at least 21 years old
• single, married or divorced
• rent an apartment or own a home
• be able to meet personal obligations with current income

The announcement continued:

School-age children and teenagers are waiting for people like you to make a personal commitment to them.

Call (602) 943-3843 ext. 51910 in Phoenix for more information.

Paul Martodam, CEO, wrote in a Catholic Sun column last year that some 85-90 percent of the children cared for by its foster families are there due to the substance abuse of their parents.”

“My definition of foster kids is normal kids with messed-up parents,” said Dan Hernandez, a St. Thomas Aquinas parishioner who has welcomed more than 70 different foster children into his Litchfield Park home over the years. “Sometimes moms are doing drugs, prostitution… the kids are exposed to things they shouldn’t see.”

Read the rest of his story and how eight of those children now forever belong to Hernandez and his wife.

A 2006 Catholic Sun letter to the editor said, “I have one regret about becoming a foster parent: not doing it sooner. The rewards have been overwhelming for myself, my family and our six foster children who came to us from Catholic Charities — four of whom my husband and I adopted.”