Salesian Missions Celebrates 75th Anniversary

Salesian Missions Celebrates 75th Anniversary

(New Rochelle, N.Y. – January 4, 2022) – Beginning this month, Salesian Missions, the U.S. development arm of the Salesians of Don Bosco, joyfully celebrates its 75th anniversary – a significant milestone in its long and fruitful partnership with generous friends. Together with its donors and friends, it has helped more than three million children around the world turn their lives around.

Ever since Fr. James O’Loughlen, SDB, established the Salesian Missions office in 1947, with a charter to tell the stories of our global works and rally support for our efforts, it has achieved success after remarkable success, not for themselves, but for the poorest, most disenfranchised, and most vulnerable children and families living in more than 130 countries around the world.

“Those successes are truly countless,” says Fr. Gus Baek, current director of Salesian Missions. “More important, they are individually significant and transformative. Ever since I stepped into this role 3 years ago, I have heard about so many children and adults whose names I will always remember. These very real people are building much brighter futures thanks to the education, training, social support, and other assistance they needed but never could have accessed on their own.”

This startling success started with a visionary director who knew exactly how to harness the potential of the U.S. Postal Service.

That director was Fr. Edward Cappelletti, who assumed directorship of Salesian Missions in 1959. For the next 44 years, Fr. Ed rose each morning with a singular focus: to live selflessly in service to the world’s poor, especially the precious children. To that end, he poured his remarkable creativity, infectious enthusiasm, and ability to motivate others into imagining – and delivering on – a new way of reaching, soliciting, and communicating with potential donors about the Salesian missionaries’ global works. Arguably, those efforts revolutionized the use of direct mail for fundraising and donor communications not only for the Salesians but also for numerous other non-profit projects.

“When you think about it, you realize that Fr. Ed’s ideas were truly visionary for the time,” says Fr. Gus. “But he never let that stop him. It’s not an understatement to say we wouldn’t be where we are today without him.”

Fr. Ed’s ideas included scouring local telephone books for surnames that were likely to be Catholic—and manually collecting the addresses into a mailing list. And so, from a small basement office at the provincial house in New Rochelle, he and 5 typists did exactly that. That list was comprised of thousands of names and grew to include a new segment of Spanish-speaking Catholics identified by cross-referencing local phone books against one from Puerto Rico. In 1972, Salesian Missions moved into a new office building adjacent to the provincial house, built to accommodate the new technologies and processes Fr. Ed adopted to support our fundraising goals. That building, officially dedicated in 2014 to Fr. Ed, remains our headquarters today.

Although he died on November 12, 2013, at the age of 93, Fr. Ed’s indelible legacy continues to inspire Salesian Missions’ work. Led by equally dedicated successors, including Fr. Patrick Diver, Fr. James Marra, Brother Emile Dubé, Fr. Mark Hyde, and now Fr. Gus, the mission office communicates with a multitude of generous donors and partners every day.

Photo credit: Florian Kopp/Salesian Missions

This work continues to respond to help fund the work of nearly 30,000 Salesian missionaries (priests, brothers, and sisters), and has improved the lives and futures of over three million children, in more than 130 countries around the world.

“Together with our friends, we are the torch-bearers keeping Fr. James O’Loughlen’s and Fr. Ed’s flames bright and alive,” concludes Fr. Gus. “I hope you will continue to join me in igniting that passion among even more supporters who will carry it forward into the next 75 years … and beyond.”

Source: Salesian Missions