Pacoima, California priest, Fr John Lasseigne, is working with local residents to help them stop banks from foreclosing on their homes. "When I first arrived in the church, at the end of Mass, a family came to speak with me and said, 'Father, would you pray for us? We are about to lose our home,' " Fr Lasseigne told CNN. "Suddenly, the crisis became very real and personal for me."
Lasseigne is the priest of Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in the Southern California community of Pacoima, where one in every nine homes is in some stage of foreclosure. He says the people in this community were targeted by predatory lenders and given loans they never should have qualified for.
"Many of them were lured into taking out mortgages that had very small interest payments in the beginning, which then ballooned into much larger payments later," he said.
Fr Lasseigne began to preach to his congregation about the power of community organization. He teamed up with the One LA community group, and together they started teaching Foreclosure 101 to his flock.
"There are hundreds, if not thousands, of families in my immediate neighborhood at risk of losing their homes," he said.
Fr Lasseigne says that sometimes people here didn't know what they were signing onto when they got loans.
He describes himself as a man who carries God's message and who gets involved with the "social needs of my people."
"I believe that many of these families have been taken advantage of and been the subject of financial entrapment," he said.
"The church is concerned about the health of its community, and if the community is going through an upheaval and many families are being dislocated, we have to respond.
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Source (CTHN)
SV (ED)