By Owen Phelps, Ph.D.
Director, Yeshua Institute
Some years ago I got an email invitation I wasn’t expecting. It was from an old friend, but one I had seen only once in several years.
We had crossed paths at his dad’s funeral Mass. Earlier he had lost his only sibling, a baby brother, at birth and some years later his mother had passed. So it fell to him to eulogize his dad at the end of the funeral Mass. He did a wonderful job.
A week or so later I reached out to get a copy of his talk, and he replied with an invitation to lunch.
At lunch he asked me for help giving some money away.
He confessed that except for his father’s funeral he hadn’t been inside a church in decades. But one remnant of his Catholic upbringing was that he trusted charities run by the Catholic Church and related entities.
Maximum efficiency
He was certain, he explained, that Catholic charities operated with maximum care and efficiency – and that no one got rich handling their donations. He wanted to contribute to charities that helped victims, not administrators.
I asked him if he had other conditions and he was ready with an answer. “I want it to provide immediate help to people, ideally families. I want it to be local. And I want it to be anonymous.”
Near the end of our conversation, I asked him how much he intended to give away. “About a million dollars,” he said. It was money he knew his father intended to give away but didn’t have time to get it done. Instead, it was part of my friend’s inheritance.
He wanted to follow through on his father’s intentions.
I got busy trying to help him, and I confess I eventually referred him to a couple of non-Catholic charities that I knew to be doing an excellent job of stewardship.
Catholic preference
But like him, I have always had a preference for assisting others through Catholic charities – and for the very same reasons he has for preferring them: the needy really get help and no one gets rich pilfering donations intended for those in need.
More recently I heard from a friend who lives near Asheville, NC. Dave Coe, a Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus Master Facilitator and frequent contributor to The Catholic Leader, reported that in the wake of Hurricane Helene he and his family have safely relocated to the Charlotte area, east of Asheville.
But he appealed for assistance for the Charlotte Diocese’s Catholic Charities ministry which serves the 46 counties in the western half of North Carolina, including Asheville and much of the area most viciously besieged by Hurricane Helene.
You can learn much more about what Catholic Charities is doing in western North Carolina by visiting its Facebook page. As a testament to the importance and extent of the diocese’s relief efforts, here is a photo of Bishop Michael Martin unloading a truck of relief supplies at Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Hendersonville NC
And if you share my predisposition to support Catholic charities – and especially Catholic Charities’ ministries operated by most of our nation’s dioceses – perhaps you’ll consider doing what I did just before publishing this story: make a donation here.