EARTHQUAKE / THE LONG ROAD BACK : Soccer and a Missionary Outdraw the NFL : Relief: Volunteers nourish evacuees’ bodies and souls at a Valley shelter. The biggest attraction is communion.

They came with the best of intentions, bearing four television sets and pancake breakfasts for 1,000, hoping to help the victims of last Monday’s earthquake take their minds off their misery.

But it became immediately clear that the dozens of volunteers who descended on the American Red Cross shelter in San Fernando on Sunday calculated the appetites of the evacuees better than their craving for entertainment. The volunteers, from the Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, tuned the four television sets to National Football League playoffs, but a Mexican soccer game, some Raiderettes and the appearance of a Catholic priest proved to be bigger attractions than the Kansas City-Buffalo game.

The volunteers, who provided food for hundreds of residents as well as the more than 500 people staying in the shelter, thought football would be a welcome diversion.

“Sunday is such a family day, such a football day,” said Lisa Haller, one of the Hyatt employees who organized the event at the shelter at San Fernando Recreation Park. “We tried to bring home out here as much as possible.”

But as the earthquake victims clustered on cots in the gymnasium and under a giant tent outside, enjoying the hearty meal of scrambled eggs, home fries, bacon and pancakes, only a handful paid any attention to the television sets.

Inside the gymnasium, about a dozen men changed the channel on one of the sets so they could watch two Mexican soccer teams face off. Sitting on a metal folding chair in front of the screen, Joaquin Moreno explained that the game, between rival Mexican teams, was more exciting for Mexicans than the NFL playoffs.

“This is a Super Bowl for us in Mexico,” said Moreno, whose mobile home in Sylmar was flattened by the quake. “It’s like a classic.”

Many of the children staying at the shelter passed time playing in the park playground or talking with their families as they sat on cots inside, or on grassy areas under gray skies.

Dressed in black-and-white Raiders jackets and carrying silver pompons, a trio of Raiderettes offered another distraction.

“They know you are somebody even though they don’t know who you are,” said Raiderette Kelly Morris of Whittier before pausing to sign an autograph for a young boy.

But neither the Mexican soccer game nor the Raiderettes came close to the power of attraction that Catholic priest Gerrit Crawford demonstrated when he arrived at the park at midmorning, dressed in white robes and carrying a silver bowl of communion wafers.

A medical missionary from St. Jude Health Center in San Bernardino, Crawford visited the shelter as one of many stops on a tour of the San Fernando Valley on Sunday.

“We’re going to keep going until the sacrament runs out,” Crawford said, adding that he had enough for about 1,200 people.

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More than 100 people dropped their conversations or put down their plates and swarmed around Crawford, who tied a tapestry of the Virgin Mary around a tree trunk and began a five-minute service from behind a makeshift altar made of a folding table draped with a white cloth. As he recited the Lord’s Prayer, a hush came over the park, with only the thumping of a military helicopter overhead and the occasional cry of a small child to interrupt it.

“This is very beautiful,” said Edward Sierra, a shelter resident who lost all of his possessions when the quake hit the home he rented in San Fernando. “It helps people’s souls so they won’t be afraid anymore.”