Kevin Kelly/Key photo Bishop Raymond J. Boland receives his bowl of soup at Souper Bowl VI, the annual Advent season event to raise awareness of hunger throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area.

"Our salvation will depend on how we respond to that challenge to be our brother's keeper," the bishop said, recalling Christ's commandment in the Gospel of Matthew to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and visit the imprisoned, the sick and the lonely.

"Our theology is summed up by saying, 'What am I going to do about that?'" he said. "Not tomorrow. Not when I get old. Not when I write my will. Not when I am comfortable. What am I going to do about it today?"

At the sixth luncheon, co-sponsored by the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph and the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, those who jammed the Count Basie Ballroom at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Kansas City learned what students from Catholic high schools on both sides of the state line were doing to combat hunger in their city.

They learned from Jim Berg, a student at Archbishop O'Hara High School in Kansas City, about the success of the October "Food for Thought" campaign in the schools.

"The food we collected will feed 327 families for an entire year," Berg told the ballroom audience. "In addition, a substantial amount of money - $14,000 - was raised."

Challenged only with conducting food drives in their own schools to help the two co-sponsoring social service agencies - The Bishop Sullivan Center and The Seton Center - fill their food pantries, the students collected enough food and money on their own not only to stock those two centers, but to fill the pantries of five other parish-based social service agencies as well.

"Thanks to the students, many families were helped," Berg said.

But equally as important, the students said, "Food for Thought" taught them who the poor were.

"The hungry are people like you and I," said Brian Raggett, a student at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Overland Park, Kan., who was among the students who met the clients at the two Kansas City social service centers.

"The hungry are working mothers and their children. They make sacrifices every day that we can only think of," he said. "They did nothing wrong to be put in the situation they are in. A terrible twist of fate put them there."

Tiana Scrivo, a student at Bishop Miege High School in Roeland Park, Kan., told of a "Food for Thought" exercise in which she was to plan a monthly budget for herself on a monthly income of $610, slightly above minimum wage.

"It was impossible," she said. "I thought there was no way people have to do this. But I learned that there were more than I could even imagine."

Kathy Hoffman, a student at Notre Dame de Sion High School, said she learned about homelessness through a student council-sponsored project that invited volunteers to sleep outside for one night in November. Even though the night was unseasonably warm, Hoffman said the lesson will not be forgotten.

"I felt horrible," she said. "My back hurt, and I was dirty. And this was after one night in 60-degree weather with a sleeping bag and a pillow."

Hoffman said that all the students in all the high schools participating in Food for Thought knew that their efforts would be temporary, that the food and money they raised were not a permanent cure for hunger.

"I knew that in a few days, the (pantry's) shelves would be bare again," she said. "Each of us can make an impact, but we need to join together. Even if you help one person for one day, you've helped. If we all help just one person for one day, we will conquer hunger."

Kansas City, Kan, Archbishop James P. Keleher told the crowd that "chronic hunger in a land of plenty is a problem we Americans cannot tolerate and should not tolerate."

"We are responsible for one another," the archbishop said. "Time and time again, it is said (in Scripture), 'You must take care of the orphan, the widow, the alienated, and you will be judged on how well you do that."

Archbishop Keleher also said that it will take global action to eliminate hunger on a global scale, and called for forgiveness of the international debt of developing nations as one step toward conquering hunger.

"In African and Latin America, more than half of the budgets of many nations are consumed in paying debts on loans," he said. "With that tremendous burden, people cannot eat well, cannot be housed well, and cannot get health care."

Special guest Tim Grunhard, center for the Kansas City Chiefs, told the crowd that he learned through 16 years of Catholic education, including four years at the University of Notre Dame, that "freedom is based on laws and morality."

He challenged the students to "take the right road. Challenge yourselves, challenge your classmates, challenge your neighbors to be the best they can be."

"You have a responsibility to hunger for morality, to hunger to stay involved with the religious aspects of your life," Grunhard said.