Msgr. Richard Ahlemeyer, pastor at St. Camillus-St. Virgilius Parish, knows very well the value of Bright Christmas.
After being in charge of parishes that needed the extra assistance that Bright Christmas provides, he now oversees a more affluent congregation and has made it his mission to raise much needed funds for the campaign.
The history of the fund goes back decades. In the 1960s, Don Zirkle, then editor of The Tablet, saw the financial struggles many families faced trying to make the holidays happy — and the Bright Christmas Fund was born.
In the early 1980s, The Tablet Editor Emeritus Ed Wilkinson took the reins and helped the Bright Christmas Fund continue to grow. And now nearly 60 years later, while it would be thrilling to report that the need has diminished, it has not.
Msgr. Ahlemeyer initially served in smaller, less privileged parishes, including St. Mary’s Church in Long Island City and Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Jamaica, where he started a soup kitchen that is still serving the community today, nearly 40 years later. Then he was assigned to St. Pius V Church in Jamaica where he stayed from 1995 to 2007 before receiving his current pastoral assignment.
It was while serving at St. Mary’s that he was introduced to the Bright Christmas Fund by Wilkinson, who he has known since 1964 when they both attended Cathedral Prep. “We were really struggling at St. Mary’s and we were in debt when I arrived there,” recalled Msgr. Ahlemeyer.
“And I remember being at the St. Vincent de Paul camp when Ed was taking pictures, and while sitting down for lunch he said to me, ‘Rich, you’ve never written in for Bright Christmas. You need to do that because I know that you can use the help at St. Mary’s.’ So I did, and Eddie was very generous and we were able to buy gifts and have a Christmas party for the children.”
Wilkinson recalled handwriting the Bright Christmas letters every year at that time. “The pastors would respond back and guys like Richie Ahlemeyer, who is a big-hearted guy, knew that when I sent him that money it was going to be put to good use to buy toys for the children,” recalled Wilkinson.
The church would hold a raffle and number all the gifts so that when Mass was over the children would go downstairs, pick a number and take a gift. Msgr. Ahlemeyer recalled taking his two nephews with him to shop for the kids at Toys R Us as people would watch them leave the store with overflowing carts filled with toys, which he called an incredibly fulfilling experience.
In early November Msgr. Ahlemeyer received a call from a former parishioner at St. Mary’s Parish. The now 42-year-old man was a young boy when Msgr. Ahlemeyer first met him, while serving as parochial vicar from 1977 to 1983. He had kept in touch with the boy’s family via yearly Christmas cards, and the man was now calling to tell him that his mother was in hospice care.
“I was saddened to hear that news,” said Msgr. Ahlemeyer. “And then he said to me, ‘You know father, I still remember how generous you were to us and how at Christmas you gave out toys. And you don’t know, but the one year you did it and brought us downstairs to get a toy, that was the only toy I received because my family was too poor to afford to buy us Christmas presents.”
When Msgr. Ahlemeyer arrived at St. Camillus-St. Virgilius in 2007, he discovered that he was taking over the pastorship of a more financially solvent church. “So, when Bright Christmas came around I said that now it’s time for me through this parish to pay back for the generosity that The Tablet’s Bright Christmas had given to me in my previous parishes. It’s like paying forward or paying it back,” Msgr. Ahlemeyer said.
The man from St. Mary’s is “42 years old and he still remembers what the generosity of people did for him. And that’s a perfect example of what Bright Christmas has done through the years. It’s a great thing.”
If you want to donate to Bright Christmas, just head to TheTablet.Org.