Community Outreach

Sister Parishes | Neighborhood | Schools | Beyond the Boundaries

In addition to all that our parishioners do as individuals, as a parish family we are also involved in the wider church and the wider world.

Sister Parishes

We share ministry with two sister parishes, San Juan de Limay in Nicaragua, and Blessed George Matulaitis in Lithuania. We began these relationship years ago, when the Nicaraguan Church was being oppressed by the United States and the Lithuanian Church by the Soviet Union, hoping to witness to the love of God against the powers that be of both the right and the left.

Limay pictures courtesy of Tom Hyatt

San Juan de Limay is a small town in rural Nicaragua in the province of Estile. We have partnered with St. John's United Methodist Church in supporting Casa Baltimore, a community center there. Programs have ranged from a micro-loan fund to a day-care center, and visitors have come and gone both ways over the years, giving each of us a better appreciation of the life and faith of the other. We have helped them rebuild after Hurricane Mitch, and matched funds they raised to repair their church roof. They have helped us understand what persistence in faith under trial really means.

Bl. George Matulaitis parish in Vilnius, Lithuania is named in honor of the Archbishop of Vilnius from 1918 to 1925 who was beatified by Pope Pius XII.  It is is a new church in a working class suburb of Vilnius that Fr. Casimir Pugevicius introduced us to. (Fr. Cas used to live here, and used our community as a base for his work as a spymaster, helping to keep the underground church alive during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania.)  They are the sort of Christians whose priority was to create a hymnal for their congregation while there was as yet no heat in their church. We helped them create it, and it has become a national asset, used in parishes all over their country. We later also helped them heat the church, which was so cold in the winter that the wine would freeze if left there overnight.

The Neighborhood

St. Vincent's is a part of Jonestown, Baltimore's oldest neighborhood. Most of us do not live here (we come mostly from all over the City and the five surrounding counties), but we all realize that choosing this church means accepting a responsibility for its neighborhood, in which we participate in a number of ways.

We were among the original organizers of the Jonestown Planning Council, our neighborhood association. Over the last 30 years, the Council has represented the voice of the neighborhood in projects ranging from the completion of the Jones Falls Expressway to the creation of the subway, to the establishment of Shot Tower Park.

Our proudest achievement has been the demolition of the high-rise public housing projects and their replacement with honest blocks of rowhouses, where people have front doors and backyards and neighbors. The final piece of this is still underway: the new construction going on between Baltimore and Pratt Sts, which will break new ground in Baltimore by combining housing for the poor, the middle class, and the rich all in one small area, setting an example for the suburbs of what we talk about in Beyond the Boundaries.

The Jonestown Planning Council, in turn, spun off a separate non-profit corporation, the Jonestown Day Care Center, Inc., which operates the day care center at the corner of Baltimore and High Sts. The Board includes several representatives from the parish, and we help every month with the food bill. The Center has had a rough time during the tearing down and reconstruction of the neighborhood, but looks forward to better days as old families come back and new families move in.

One of the most recent projects in the neighborhood is Heritage Walk, a project of the Baltimore City Heritage Area and the Historic Jonestown, Inc.  St. Vincent participated fully in the development of this groundbreaking walking tour and is Star Attraction #14 on the tour.

Our Schools

Education is something the Church knows how to do well. For about 150 years now, we have been educating the children of the poor, starting with our own immigrant Irish, Italian, and Polish poor, and turning out generation after generation of kids who, thanks to the church schools and their parents' sacrifice, had the chance to be the first college graduates in their families.

We're still doing it. St. Vincent's no longer has a school on parish property, but we, along with four other parishes without schools, help organize and support two schools that no longer have parishes. St James and John and St. Katharine are the only two African-American Catholic schools in East Baltimore, and they are worthy successors of our tradition. With a total enrollment of over 600, these schools send most of their graduates (most of whom come from poor and working class families) to Catholic high schools and the best of the city-wide public schools and thence on to college.

Our parish has three members on the school Board, several of our parishioners volunteer to run an outstanding ecological program there, and we contribute 6% of our offertory income to the Financial Aid Fund which matches the parents' sacrifice. We also contribute 50% of our annual Cardinal's Lenten Appeal income to the scholarship endowment fund that ensures the future for these schools.

We also have a parish tuition assistance program that makes up the difference between in-parish and out-of-parish rates for our parishioners with children in other parishes' schools so that they can get a Catholic education for their kids without leaving our parish community.

Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries is an Archdiocesan program to mobilize the support of our Catholic people for inclusive housing policies. Working with various civic organizations, other churches, and political leaders, the program tries to establish public policies that will enable rich, middle class, and poor people to live together in the same neighborhoods and communities. Parishioner Dr. Ray Bahr has been a major leader in this effort, and will be happy to talk to you about it.