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December 14, 2023By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
WORCESTER – Shock and concern spurred a retired deacon to seek $20,000 – in addition to Christmas presents – for a family served by one of his programs.
This year approximately 10,000 gifts, plus stocking stuffers, are to be distributed to children in about 700 families, through the Christmas Giving Program run by Urban Missionaries of Our Lady of Hope, according to Deacon Walter F. Doyle.
He and his wife, Kathy, started the non-profit organization, once called the Refugee Apostolate, in 1979, and its Christmas program in 1983. Over the years the ministry expanded to include social services besides refugee resettlement. It is headquartered at 242 Canterbury St.
Among people applying for Christmas gifts this fall was a pregnant woman and family for whom Deacon Doyle is raising funds. On the ministry’s website, urbanmissionaries.com, he explained why.
“How many children?” he asked, when she arrived.
“Five.” (The oldest is 10 years old.)
“She has five already, and now here comes the sixth,’” he thought.
“And we are going to get Christmas gifts for your unborn child,” he told her. “Do you have a name picked out that you would like us to use?”
“I am having triplets.”
“Three!” he shouted.
The mother laughed, amused at his surprise.
“That’s eight!” he stammered.
He told other Urban Missionaries workers and they were amazed, since they don’t usually get families that large nowadays. The mother said she was due in December.
“After she left, there was something nagging at me,” Deacon Doyle wrote in his story on the ministry’s website.
“It [the nagging feeling] was still there after I woke up the next day. ‘How is this family going to survive?’ … I am still pondering that question, but I have decided that we will start a special GoFundMe this Christmas for this family.” (Contributions for them and/or for Christmas gifts for the program can be made on urbanmissionaries.com or by mailing to 242 Canterbury St. a check made out to Urban Missionaries of Our Lady of Hope. The GoFundMe had raised $1,610 for the family as of Dec. 15.)
Deacon Doyle said he will include with the family’s Christmas gifts the amount collected and later give the family any money contributed through the end of February. He’s doubtful it will be as much as the $20,000 goal he arbitrarily picked.
This is the first time the ministry has asked for money for a family receiving gifts, but not the first time money has been given, he said.
One year a beneficiary returned with a $50 bill found in the jacket given to her son. She thought it was a mistake, but Deacon Doyle said it was for her, courtesy of the benefactor.
The Doyles started the Christmas program 40 years ago upon realizing that Vietnamese refugees they had sponsored to come to the United States would not receive presents, because they didn’t know how to access available gift programs.
“Kathy and I called our friends up” and asked for donations, Deacon Doyle said. Recipients and donors were thrilled, and the Doyles decided to do it again the following year.
“Pretty soon we were hooked,” Deacon Doyle said. “We started to call different churches … seeing if we could get gifts,” not just for refugees but also for long-time city residents.
A member of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Northborough told him about a giving-tree program used in another state. The evergreens, that were set up in churches, had gift tags on them. Parishioners would choose a tag and donate a gift for people in need.
“I had never heard of it,” Deacon Doyle said. “We then called every parish in the [Worcester] Diocese,” and learned they were unfamiliar with this.
The next year, the ministry created tags for 80 parishes that agreed to participate. Now, the deacon said, St. Rose of Lima takes the most tags – 600!
This year there are about 35 Catholic parishes, two non-Catholic churches and five businesses participating.
“It’s the lowest we’ve ever had,” he said. “And we’ve had a number of them drop the number of tags significantly.”
New toys, coats, hats, mittens and money to buy them are still needed.
“We start taking names [of recipients] the first Saturday in October” and continue that process through Dec. 23, he said.
To qualify, parents must be unemployed or earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or receiving help through the Department of Transitional Assistance, Deacon Doyle said.
Parents must show their picture ID and their children’s social security cards and birth certificates (to identify the children) and pay $7 per child (pre-born through age 14) for the gifts. Paying enables recipients to contribute to the program and helps make them equal to donors, Deacon Doyle said. He said the age cap was lowered because “we had 16-year-olds … signing up their kids.”
Parents make gift requests and Urban Missionaries tries to honor those, Deacon Doyle said. Typical are dolls, educational toys, sometimes drones, and, this year, “Squishmallows” stuffed toys.
Urban Missionaries delivers tags to parishes, then picks up the gifts with tags attached.
The ministry stopped the wrapping of gifts in 2015, as a response to Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, published that year, Deacon Doyle said. He said they probably saved 25,000 rolls of wrapping paper altogether, and that parents were unwrapping gifts anyway to check what was in the packages.
At the Canterbury Street headquarters, more than 100 volunteers sort and bag gifts, which parents can pick up there from Dec. 10 through Feb. 29, Deacon Doyle said. One family of volunteers came for 32 years, and some recipients have come for 25 years, he said.
He recalled a recipient, encountering him at a restaurant, declaring, “You’re Santa Claus.” She called a waiter – her son – and asked, “Remember all the toys you got? This is the guy that gave them to you.”
But Deacon Doyle credits a higher power. He said Sister Mary Daniel Malloy, a Religious Sister of Mercy, now deceased, told him, “God has plenty of money.” “She’s absolutely right,” the deacon said. “He has given us everything that we needed – and more.”
