DETROIT — Don’t throw away all those plastic bags you bring home from the grocery store — they could have a higher purpose.

At St. Colette Parish, for example, they’re being used by the hundreds to make mats for the homeless.

A friend of Mary Stafford told her about how it’s done in California, and Stafford brought the idea to her parish in Livonia. There, several ladies have embraced it as part of St. Colette’s larger effort to support Sr. Judie Ann Ruggirello’s ministry to Detroit’s homeless.

Now, old plastic grocery bags that would otherwise have been mostly discarded are being turned into mats to give a few homeless people a bit softer of a bed than the pavement or hard floor they would otherwise have to lie on.

“You would not believe how beautiful these mats are. You’d never know they were made of plastic bags,” said Jan DiBasio, one of five regulars in the group that meets at St. Colette every Wednesday morning to work on the mats.

It takes about 500-700 bags to make each mat, but with each trip to the supermarket resulting in quite a few bags, obtaining the raw material has not been a problem, DiBasio said.

Each bag is flattened, then folded in half and folded in half again, she said. The handles are cut off, and the folded bags are cut into strips and tied together to form a plastic yarn, or “plarn,” which is then used to crochet the mats.

Often other women will sit in with the group, and some older or infirm parishioners will do some of the work at home.

That’s also true of some of the other support St. Colette provides to Sr. Ruggirello’s ministry. Every sandwich bag she hands out is hand-decorated with a message or illustration to convey God’s love to the recipient, and some of that work is done by homebound parishioners.

The mat-makers and other parishioners also go down to the rectory of St. Joseph Parish, between Eastern market and Lafayette Park in Detroit, to help Sr. Ruggirello make sandwiches and deliver them.

Altogether, about 50 parishioners are involved in supporting the homeless ministry, and that’s not counting the parish’s youth group, which is helping out in August.

Sr. Ruggirello is a former Felician, now personally professed as she works to start a new religious community to be called the Sisters of Christian Love.

“Bishops (Donald) Hanchon and (Francis) Reiss have been helping me, and several women are coming this fall to see whether they want to be a part of it — one lay Maryknoll missioner and two sisters who are the last remaining members of their order,” Sr. Ruggirello said.



In the meantime, she is keeping up her work of distributing food and other items to what she calls her “treasures of the streets” five days a week.

“The Holy Spirit just guides me to them,” she said.

Telling how she came to be inspired to start such a ministry, Sr. Ruggirello recounts a visit to a Detroit alley to see a beautiful array of morning glories she had heard about. The flowers were there, but so was an elderly man who had no food.

“Things like that happen all the time. I found a mother feeding her three little children out of a dumpster,” she added.

Besides handing sandwiches to whomever she sees, Sr. Ruggirello will also stand outside an abandoned building where homeless people are believed to be living, calling out to whomever’s inside: “Father, Son and Holy Ghost — come out who needs it most.”