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Building houses, changing lives - cfl makes a difference

Story and photos by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

Catholic Fraternal Life, a fraternal insurance organization, has been teaming up with Habitat for Humanity to build houses since the organization became involved at a national fraternal congress in Nashville, Tenn., but the idea continued to produce homes, mostly in southern Illinois beginning in 1993 in Cairo. 

The group of about 50 volunteers gathered in Mt. Vernon this year to build a home, and the crew generally spends the weekend, beginning with a foundation already poured, and by the end of the weekend, fraternal communications director, Mary Barbara Kurtz  says, “the entire exterior is completed.”

“Chief cook,” Helen Wuebbels of Germantown, said the volunteers bring food with them as she and her crew cleared the lunch dishes off the picnic tables set up under a tent behind the home that was taking shape as she spoke.

Francis Rehkemper, a contractor, has been the crew leader on the building of the homes, Kurtz said.
Although the national organization built a home the first year, “we just kept doing it,” Kurtz added.

“It’s my way of giving to someone else,” Rosemary Wesolik of New Athens, said.

That appeared to be the goal of all of the people who spent the weekend at the build.

CFL was founded more than 123 yeas ago by a group of German Catholics whose sole purpose was to provide a means for financial protection for their families and create a bond of service to their community.

In January 2008, CFL is expected to merge with the Holy Family Society of the U.S.A. The society was founded in 1915 by a small group of ethnic Catholics to serve the social, financial and religious needs of a growing number of Catholics who were immigrating to the United States from Europe.

While CFL headquarters is located in Belleville, and Holy Family in Joliet, Ill., the newly formed entity, to be known as Catholic Holy Family Society, will continue to keep its headquarters in Joliet with the Belleville office to remain open to serve the members in southern Illinois, Kurtz said.