About Us
Catholic Street Missionaries is a new non-profit organization incorporated on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 3, 2016. We are under the Archdiocese of Vancouver.
We aim at developing young lay missionaries to reach out to the margins of society.
About the Founder and how Catholic Street Missionaries got started
Mildred Moy, the founder, was born in a Catholic family and attended St. Mary’s Canossian College in Hong Kong.
In 1985, she migrated to Vancouver with her family. She has a Bachelor of Science in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University, and a Master of Business Administration from University of British Columbia.
Although she was successful in her career and was living a comfortable life, she was far away from God and felt unbearably empty deep down in her heart. By God’s grace, she had a conversion experience that changed her life. Thereafter, she decided never to leave Jesus and to follow Him.
In 2003, she heard God’s call. She quit her high-paying job at IBM to devote her life to serve Jesus in the prostituted women and the addicted.
In 2004, she started St. Mary’s Street Ministry, a parish-based ministry in St. Mary’s Parish, Vancouver. Today, it has about 30 active volunteers and hundreds of intercessors praying for them and those they reach out to, including St. Clare’s Monastery and the Queen of Peace Monastery.
In 2009, she responded to God’s call to go and pray “in the heart of Jesus” by joining a contemplative charismatic community where she spent 40 hours in silence every week. It was in silence that she felt her deep yearning to reach out to the street people. A year later, her spiritual director and she had both discerned that God’s plan for her was not to stay any longer in the community but to be with the street people. Hence, she obeyed and went back to St. Mary’s Street Ministry to continue her work reaching out to the prostituted women, the addicted and the homeless.
In 2013, in recognition of her service to the poor, she received the Benerementi Medal, a Papal award from Pope Francis. (The award was presented to her by Archbishop Michael Miller in November 2013. See pictures below)
The longing to have spiritual companions to work with her full-time has been in Mildred’s heart for years. In 2015, in a 30-day silent retreat in the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, California, U.S., she confirmed God’s call to start a non-profit organization that would develop full-time street missionaries to work with her. With the blessing of Archbishop Michael Miller, Catholic Street Missionaries was incorporated on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Year of Mercy on June 3 2016.
