Helping out the Missionaries of Charity

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There’s something about people that makes them want to help other people.

On this Thanksgiving Day, let me tell you about some people who like to help people, and their longstanding traditions of helping around this warmest of holidays.

I’ve written several columns over the years about the Missionaries of Charity (the Mother Teresa nuns, as I call them) and their annual efforts to deliver home-cooked Thanksgiving dinners to some of the shut-ins of New Bedford.

The good nuns minister year-round to the elderly and disabled women and men who live in the downtown towers and sundry government and low-income housing developments. Anywhere there’s a lonely soul with no place to go on the holiday, the nuns are willing to be there for them.

Among their other good works, in the best tradition of their founder, the sisters also operate a homeless shelter for women and children, perform outreach to the inmates at the Dartmouth jail and stage summer activities for city kids.

Don’t try to talk to these nuns for a newspaper story though. This is my third column on their Thanksgiving dinner and they’ve not yet spoken to me in any great detail. The missionaries are notoriously publicity shy – they’re definitely down with Jesus’ admonition on the Sermon on the Mount that “When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do … to be honored by others.”

I’ve tried to write about the sisters before, but I haven’t written before about the many local men and women who help the nuns each Thanksgiving. These are the folks who cut up the turkeys and cook the potatoes and squash, ladle out the peas and gravy, slice up the pies and deliver it all to folks who often don’t see another living soul from one end of the day to the other.

People like local dentist Joe Mills (who first roped me into helping the nuns) and his wife Kathy and daughter Julie, people like Adam Lang and his uncle, former Mayor Scott Lang. People like Bristol County Commissioner John Saunders and his crew at the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, who every year buy all the Thanksgiving food and deliver it to the nuns, as well as a lot of other folks in Greater New Bedford.

While most of us are out at the high school football games, or laboring over our home ovens on the morning of the holiday, these folks are down at the convent getting everything ready. 

There are, of course, lots of groups around the city, who do the same thing as the Missionaries of Charity and their helpers. The United Way’s “Hunger Heroes” program, assisted by WBSM and Fun107, is one of the biggest, providing 1,000 meals each year. The Salvation Army is also always there for folks in need on Turkey Day, and so is Catholic Charities.

You can show up at a certain time to these places, or even order a Thanksgiving meal from some. Solanus Casey Food Pantry near Our Lady of Mount Carmel is in the South End and the St. Anthony of Padua Food Pantry is in the North End. They always give out turkeys and the fixings. And every Thursday in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the New Life “church for the unchurched” provides meals from 5:30 to 7. The longtime provider, MOLIFE Food Pantry, is one of the few places that still stages a sit-down meal. In addition to giving out Thanksgiving dinners prepared by Cobb’s Southern BBQ this year, MOLIFE will be having a ThanksGiving Community Meal at 11 a.m. Thanksgiving Day at their outlet at the New Bedford Hotel in the downtown.

There is no doubt an awful lot of providers and food pantries that I’m missing. Like I said, there’s a lot of people who like to help other people.

The community sit-down meals have indeed become rarer in recent years. I don’t know whether they’ve gone away because of the risks of people slipping in bad weather, the logistics of getting people together, or whether it’s just more convenient to give people their own dinners.

Kathy Mills, who is among those who have always worked hard for the sisters, remembers that their Thanksgiving outreach was originally started by the late Father Matthew Sullivan. The local pastor organized an annual Thanksgiving dinner at the old Holy Family-Holy Name School in the West End. The volunteers would go out and pick people up and bring them to the school. Father Sullivan would say a Mass and then they would all sit down to dinner, talking to the folks who they were serving.

That’s a glimpse of the old ways, that’s for sure. Nowadays, however, most of the providers usually give out a cooked meal, or even more often, give groceries to the many struggling families who are able to cook the dinner themselves.

Kathy Mills is moved to tears when she talks about why she’s been involved. Her family has been so blessed, she says, that it just makes sense to her. “They say that when you give, you receive back 10-fold,” she said. She and Joe modeled the same for their own kids, John, now a surgeon, and Julie, a therapist, who have volunteered with the nuns since they were kids and into adulthood.

“It’s been a staple in our family,” said Julie, who talks about how grateful many folks are when they open the door and the nuns are there with the meal.

Her family has just always done it, whether they had money or didn’t have money, she explained. And it’s become more important as she’s gotten older, she said. “I look at the holidays as more of an opportunity to reflect on what’s important.”

Adam Lang, a pharmacist who grew up in New Bedford, when he returns home for the holiday, always volunteers with the nuns. Now a department chief at a Veterans medical center in central Pennsylvania, he talks about the impact the sisters’ visits have on people living without a lot of family.

“You don’t really get an idea of what kind of services the nuns provide, and how important it is, until you become part of it,” he said.

It was Lang’s uncle, former Mayor Scott Lang, who first got him involved, he said, and he’s remained devoted to it. The Thanksgiving visits have helped him realize how important the sisters are to some of the shut-ins.

“They’re super excited to see the nuns,” he said. “For some of them, it’s their only social interaction.”

Former Mayor Lang said that when he turned 50 years old, he approached the Missionaries of Charity superior asking what he could do. She had a long list and he had limited time, and that’s how the Thanksgiving visits began, he said.

Though the former mayor is known for carving turkeys, and ladling gravy himself, he says it is the nuns who are there for the neglected of the city every day.

When you deliver meals with the nuns, he said, you get a sense of how the isolated people are living.

“They see people who no one else has time for,” he said.

Lang believes the sisters are barometers for what’s going on with the forgotten people of New Bedford. He checks in with them, he said, to find out what’s happening, what the issues are.

He’ll see them going up to strangers in the downtown and talking to them, he said. He sees people going into the convent at night for a meal.

“If government tried to do what they do, it would cost a fortune,” he said.

There aren’t too many places for most of us, where we get together with other folks for the sole purpose of doing something thoughtful for other people. In some ways, these Thanksgiving and Christmas outreaches are not enough. We all should be doing much more together with the forgotten people in our community.

That is not the society we live in these days. The power of the Church, the fraternal organizations, even the park department and school activities seem much diminished. Our institutions are far less central to our lives from the ones that someone like myself, who is seven-decades old, grew up with.

But I’m glad there are still folks like the Mother Teresa nuns devoting their lives to others, showing an example of what could be.

It would be something if we could all get to a world where we were volunteering 365/24/7.

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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