amy b

Amy Betros looked up from an avalanche of paperwork, first class mail, and legal pads. The late afternoon sun poured through the eastward windows of the office, formerly the sacristy of St. Luke’s Church in Buffalo, New York, now the humble headquarters of St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy. Just past the wall at her back, the nave and aisles of the original, preserved church building would be watery with blue and gold light reflected from its gilded coffered ceilings and its enormous Annunciation, a mural by the great Polish artist Jan de Rosen. In the more modest setting of the converted sacristy, Amy Betros bowed her head and raised her hands in prayer.

“Alright,” she said to the room. Her fellow missionaries looked up from their work. “We need …” (she paused) “twenty thousand dollars.”

Amy sighed–and then smiled. “Let’s pray for it.”

photo by mark dellas

The announcement fazed no one. The missionaries of St. Luke’s were used to living on the edge, from donation to donation. Now, as they did every day, the missionaries prayed. Framed likenesses of Jesus Christ and Josh Allen looked on from the crowded walls, as if lending the strength of their silent intentions.

A week later Amy was opening the day’s mail, which usually included bills, solicitations, letters of thanks, and piecemeal donations from Western New York and around the world. With accustomed ease she slit the ridge of another envelope and tugged free an uncreased rectangle of paper. She read the numbers, read them again. And she raised the check out over her desk, not unlike a paper Eucharist above a cluttered altar. She didn’t have to announce it. The others felt the change in the room. In a moment all eyes were on the slip of paper in her hand.

“The Lord answered,” Amy said. “Twenty thousand. Exactly.”

Missionaries, volunteers, and Amy herself confess to witnessing or taking part in many scenes exactly like this over the past three decades of service at St. Luke’s. When Amy and her co-founder Norm Paolini began distributing food to the hungry along those four bent spokes of the city’s radial grid–Genesee, Sycamore, Broadway, and William–they realized immediately that they had touched a deep need, one that a single night’s charity might ease, but not heal. They distributed everything they had collected and didn’t know where they would get more for the hungry who were sure to show up the next day. Somehow they did find more food for the next day. And the next day after that. Like Father Baker’s efforts on the other side of the Buffalo River nearly a century before, food and funds came to the Mission from sources mysterious or miraculous, depending on your outlook. Unexpected costs and disasters, ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the blizzard of December 2022, which lifted off the roof of the church, posed an existential threat. But help always came.

“If God wants me to keep doing it, he’ll keep funding it,” Amy said. “He’s never early,” she added, “but he’s always on time.”

In 1990, Amy Betros wandered the knobby, forested hills of Medjugorge, Bosnia. Just 36 years old, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, and the owner of the popular Amy’s Place restaurant in Buffalo’s University Heights, she had traveled more than 4,000 miles to answer a call. Weeks before, on a rare break from the restaurant, enjoying some TV and a cigarette, she had settled on a documentary about the Balkan hill town and the visions of the Virgin Mary that had appeared there. She felt a change underway. She quit smoking. She bought a ticket. And soon she was in Medjugorge. As she ascended Apparition Hill–alone, further from home than she had ever been–she overheard a priest leading a group of pilgrims in the opposite direction.

“God loves you so much, that if you were the only person to have ever lived, He still would have suffered and died just for you!” the priest said.

The words lodged and sank into her mind, slowly rearranging everything around them. Later she experienced her own vision on the hill–three flashes of light above a cross. She fell to her knees in prayer at the spot and returned to Western New York with a new, unshakeable sense of purpose. She would devote her life to helping others understand what she had learned–that God loved them.

Amy was already accustomed to feeding the needy from her restaurant’s small kitchen. “We were passing by,” she remembers occasional visitors saying, “and we heard a voice say, ‘She’ll feed you.’” Realizing these neighbors needed more than warm food, Amy opened her own home to some of the people who came to the restaurant for meals.

Two years after Medjugorge, Amy embarked on her second pilgrimage, this time to Fatima, Portugal, at the suggestion of Buffalo Bishop Edward M. Grosz. Here she met Norm Paolini, a cancer researcher and liturgical musician, also from Buffalo, who shared her sensitivity to signs and sense of calling toward a more ambitious ministry.

Their opportunity came in 1993 when they learned of the closing of St. Luke’s, once a proud and popular Catholic parish that for most of a short century had served the then predominantly Polish population of Buffalo’s East Side. Its campus–including the red-brick Italian Romanesque basilica and matching rectory, an extraordinary example of the style and close kin to the earlier St. John the Baptist Church on Amherst Street and Blessed Trinity on Leroy Street–soon would be up for sale. Betros and Paolini visited the site and met with the bishop to discuss their vision.

St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy was born the following year. Every day, in the breezeway between the church and the former school, two thousand warm meals pass from one pair of hands to another. For the missionaries, each one is a chance to reveal to someone what Amy came to understand in the hills of Medjugorge: the simple, all-surpassing reality of God’s love.

“You good?”

I looked up from my phone to the challenge. He wore high-tops and skinny jeans, a flat-brim fitted hat and an assortment of gold and silver chains. His expression was alert but not hostile.

“Oh,” I said, “I’m waiting for Amy.”

“Alright,” he said–kindly this time–and strode off into a small crowd of Buffalonians waiting for warm burritos, none of whom he felt the need to question.

I realized the man was a volunteer–and I was an outsider. In Buffalo, only a little more than a year after another outsider had driven more than three-and-a-half hours with military weapons and tactical gear to murder Black people shopping in their neighborhood’s only grocery store, a strange white man appearing at a food line perhaps rightly calls for caution. But Amy’s name eased any concern.

Terra cotta evangelists looked down from St. Luke’s red brick façade and welcomed more people through the open gates. They browsed tables of goods and racks of clothes lined up along the old octagonal baptistery jutting from the building’s eastern flank, speaking in English, Spanish, and languages I didn’t recognize. Women in colorful kangas under insulated coats began to depart, babies on their backs and black plastic bags of donated clothes balanced improbably on their heads. Though I waited in the breezeway for upwards of ten minutes without seeing any food served, the overwhelming feeling, emanating from each interaction and everyone present, was peace. These neighbors, I knew, woke up each morning to contend with challenges I would even struggle to imagine–matters of survival–but here it seemed none doubted that the next hot meal would arrive (as Amy earlier said of divine intervention) right on schedule.

St. Luke’s church–what could have been another casualty of deindustrialization and white flight–has become a lifeline for one of the nation’s poorest cities. And despite talk of renaissance and redevelopment in other corners, the view from Sycamore suggests a deepening need.

“There was always a need in Buffalo,” Amy remarked from behind her desk in the missionary office. But it’s grown in her lifetime, and certainly over the three decades she’s spent at the mission.

“I saw the upswing,” she said, nodding to the hope and Buffalo boosterism that began to animate the city and surrounding regions in the years after the Great Recession. It was largely a renaissance for the middle class, one built on craft beer, praise in national travel blogs, and an increase in home appraisals west of Main Street. Many thought a rising tide would lift all neighborhoods … eventually. “Then,” Amy remembered, “something happened.”

Covid happened, for one. Small businesses closed or cut hours. Interest rates went up, putting homes out of reach for many Buffalo families that had been saving and hoping. And rents followed: Not long ago in certain parts of Buffalo you could get a three-bedroom apartment for $350, Amy noted; now you’re lucky to find a one-bedroom for $650. Then inflation in gas and staples–“worse than Covid,” Amy said, a pressure that’s ballooned her annual budget to $1.5 million, almost all of it going to food. There was a race-motivated massacre. And last year’s historic winter storm that shut the city down for a week and killed 47 residents. Homelessness in Western New York, Amy noted, has gone up 34 percent since then.

Amidst increasing need, the population that St. Luke’s serves has also grown more diverse as immigrants continue to seek a new life in Western New York. “We’re the melting pot,” Amy said. “Everyone has one thing in common: they need something.”

Every day, Amy Betros and the St. Luke’s missionaries go to battle with the combined forces of hunger, disease, addiction, housing insecurity–macroeconomics and geopolitics–division and fear. Their strategy is simple: “If you feed people, and you give them security and love, you have peace.”

By some measures, those forces are gaining ground. But there has been progress. St. Luke’s maintained its meal volume even through Covid and the inflation that followed. Local donors, ranging from corporations like Walmart, Tops, Wegmans, and Rich Products to nameless individuals, continue to step up. St. Luke’s is on track to launch a mobile food delivery truck to get to harder-to-reach people in need. And across Sycamore, a white placard heralds progress on the missionaries’ most ambitious project yet: the Build Promise Center, which will bring together 28 other community organizations to provide comprehensive medical, social, and human services in one place.

“I’m praying it’s gonna swing again,” Amy remarked. “It’s gotta swing.”

But Amy isn’t waiting. Occupying the same humble space for the last 30 years, she works from behind a desk that a Hollywood set designer couldn’t have cluttered more eclectically: four inbox-outbox towers (apparently undifferentiated); seven legal pads and an avalanche of bills; an iPad, an iPhone, and an old cordless; cellophaned lunch with a side of omeprazole, Advil, and olive oil; and a signed photo of Betros with Bills franchise quarterback Josh Allen, who looks down at this tempest with the same equanimity as the many devotional portraits of Christ, the Apostles, and the Holy Family that fill the walls. From this unlikely nerve center she coordinates the delivery of 2,000 meals a day, six days a week; another 5,000 meals between Thanksgiving and Christmas; home staples for 350 area families; deliveries of food to families of migrants at the Holiday Inn by the airport; the operations of the Mission Mall; a home school program; a 20-bed shelter; an addiction-recovery home; and the many needs of a hundred-year-old architectural treasure.

Given these multiplying demands and priorities, still-increasing food costs, and ambitious plans to build a men’s shelter across the street, what, I ask, does Amy Betros pray for these days?

“Money–always,” she says. “And for the Bills to win a Super Bowl.”

To learn more about St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy, visit stlukesmissionofmercy.org.

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