St. Vincent de Paul Society of Georgia Receives their Largest Ever Gift

December 21,2012

In October Father Frank McNamee received a request to meet for spiritual counseling with a woman seeking to reconnect with the Catholic Church as she faced death. Arranging with her nurse, he visited her, and their conversations were good but brief as she was very weak. But she knew “this was the right thing to do.”

The rector of the Cathedral of Christ the King, Father McNamee visited her three times.

“She wanted to be at peace. She really just wanted to reconcile with the church, just to come back to the church. She was putting all her affairs in order and that was one thing she really wanted to do,” Father McNamee recalled. “She knew she was going to pass and she wanted to get to heaven. It was a great privilege for a priest to be able to journey with that person in the last days of her life.”

Later she expressed her desire to anonymously aid the poor and suffering and asked him to suggest such charities. He mentioned the St. Vincent de Paul Society and others. On the final visit to celebrate Mass, she gave him a white envelope.

“I left and opened the envelope. … It was a gift for a half million (dollars). It was directing a check be taken from a trust and go to St. Vincent de Paul,” he recalled. “I was honored. I was totally surprised and shocked. Helping the work of SVdP, I knew that gift would be such a tremendous blessing to the work of SVdP.”

The Society’s executive director and CAP Member, John Berry, then got the good news on his cell phone from Father McNamee while driving between meetings.

“I was just kind of responding like I would to any small gift, and he said, ‘It’s kind of a big gift.’ I said something like ‘oh really’ and he said $500,000 and that’s when I almost crashed the car. I said I’ll be there in 10 minutes and drove to the cathedral. It’s the biggest gift we’ve ever received in our 110 years of the Society in Georgia,” he said.

-Courtesy, The Georgia Bulletin