A year with St. Vincent de Paul

Mary Beth Fitzgerald, right, and volunteers (from left) Diane Jones, Pat Laubacher, and Paul Carter prepare to go out on home visits on Jan. 30. (NTC/Kevin Bartram)

In its first year, the new St. Vincent de Paul conference at St. Philip the Apostle Parish in Flower Mound has grown significantly and helped many of their neighbors in dire need.

“We had a gentleman call us and — talk about divine intervention, because he’s not calling a phone number that’s being picked up right away, he’s leaving a message.

He left a message, and I think within 30 minutes, our person on hotline duty happened to call and retrieve that message,” said Mary Beth Fitzgerald, president of the St. Philip Conference.

“This guy was standing outside in August, you know 106 degrees or whatever it was, under a tree on the grounds of a weekly motel. He had his 10-month-old and his 10-year-old with him. And he needed help. He needed a place to stay,” Fitzgerald said.

“We were able to help him, and we all wound up really, almost falling in love with this little family. And we really tried to help him as much as we could,” she said.  

Another example, Fitzgerald said, was a woman who was a parishioner. 

She was married, had a 5- and 10-year-old, and woke up one morning to discover that her husband had left her and taken the couple’s only working car. 

She was working full-time as a teacher’s aide, Fitzgerald said, but now as a single earner, wasn’t making a living wage.

The woman and her children were assigned to husband-and-wife Vincentian members.

“They went above and beyond. They just, again, fell in love with her and her family, and they wound up driving her and her children to work/school, because she worked in the school, for four weeks while we got the car repaired,” Fitzgerald said.

“Literally, who knows, I could have been sitting next to her in the pew the weekend before,” Fitzgerald continued. “You never would have known.

“There’s some situations that are just so overwhelming that it almost brings you to your knees. And first of all, that somebody’s living in a particular situation, let alone within our parish boundaries. We serve Flower Mound and Lewisville, which is kind of a nice little bubble-like community for the most part. Most of us are doing pretty well here, only to realize the struggles that go on could be next door,” she said. 

A larger purpose
The St. Philip Conference began serving the parish on Feb. 1, 2024. Now, the conference has about 30 members, up from the 15 founding members.

For Fitzgerald and others, working at the conference has great meaning.

“It’s like I have found my home, my place, my ‘what I was supposed to be doing,’” Fitzgerald said. 

St. Philip joins 12 other parishes with conferences in the Fort Worth Diocesan Council, totaling about 400 members.

Vincentians make home visits to neighbors who request financial assistance for rent, utilities, and emergencies. They offer spiritual and emotional support; distribute free food and other goods; and provide a micro-loan program to relieve high-interest payday and title loans. 
 

Recently, Fort Worth diocesan Vincentians began assisting with expensive prescription medications as part of a program that started in the Diocese of Dallas.

Victor Craig, president of the Fort Worth Diocesan SVdP Council, said he sees a clear challenge for the organization.

“I think homelessness prevention is our main point that we try and assist with people in their homes, bring stability to the families, hope, and that they continue to move forward without a lot of disruption, because once you leave home, then it’s a bunch of chaos after that,” Craig said. “Five years ago, a lot of groups were helping with rent, but rent takes a lot and some have gotten out of the game.”

Neighbors in need

The conference has what Fitzgerald called a “warm line,” an unmanned phone number that people can call to leave a message.

A parish Vincentian checks the message and calls the person back to get more information, find out what the need is, and if there is a time frame associated with it.

“If it’s rent, is there an eviction notice? If it’s a utility bill, is there a shut-off notice? Those are the two big things that we help with, but also, we’ve helped with car repairs and medical bills and certainly food and household goods,” Fitzgerald said. “At that point, we set up a home visit, and we go out in pairs, and we go and meet with the neighbor in their home.”

The home visit brings them to a unique place in the life of the person seeking assistance.

“That’s a privilege to be invited into that space with somebody, because it’s not a conversation I’m going to have on the street,” Fitzgerald said. “So you feel you’re doing God’s work, doing what He wants us to do, being the hands and feet of Jesus, bringing light and hope to our neighbors — to be able to connect and to see in their eyes,” she said.

Fitzgerald said it’s not easy for people to ask for help.

She said that callers sometimes tell them, “You’re the only ones that called us back. You’re the only ones that seem to care.”

Fitzgerald said when a Vincentian does a follow-up, clients are “amazed, and they’ll tell us horror stories about other places and social service agencies where they’ve tried to get help, and they can’t even get an appointment. Or they sit there in an office in the waiting room all day and then can’t even be helped.”

If they could, the St. Philip conference would help everybody, but funds are limited.

“If I had that big, big magic pot of money and a magic wand, I would help everybody. I would give everybody what they need. But, you know, we have to be discerning and be good stewards of our money,” Fitzgerald said.

In 2024, the 13 conferences of St. Vincent de Paul in the Diocese of Fort Worth gave:
$553,798 in rent assistance
$596,513 in utility assistance
$1,040,263 value in food
$4,000,000 value in medications.
Almost 40,000 individuals were helped.