Add Us To Your Will or Trust
To bequeth a gift to us in your will or to make us a beneficiary of a trust, please provide the following to your attorney or perparer:
Our Federal 501(c)3 EIN (Employer Identification Number) is:
34-1711270
Our State of Ohio non-profit corporate name and address:
The Mary Foundation, Inc.19524 Center Ridge Rd, Ste 4
Rocky River, OH 44116
A Message from Our Founder
-Saint John Chrysostom
If you are considering adding us to your will or making us the beneficiary of a trust, I think you may enjoy this introduction to our unusual approach to evangelization.
First, we run a tight ship here, to exacting professional standards rivalling or exceeded any worldly corporation.
For over three decades we have been the most financially efficient Catholic apostolate in America in terms of influencing tens of millions of people worldwide by distributing free materials, helping young adults grow in holiness, and spearheading our history-changing Operation True Cross prayer movement.
Our world-class website alone, established at the dawn of the Internet in 1996, reaches millions every year through its extraordinary search engine placement.
Yet we accomplish everything we do while striving to treat everyone who comes into contact with us with individual personal kindness, as befits an apostolate dedicated to Our Lady. We really do make every human effort to honor the Mother of God in this way.
If you have had any contact with us, then you already know from experience that this is true. We learned from our patron, Saint Maximilian (who was ahead of his time and remains ahead of our time) that technology, innovation, and dogged efficiency can be used to treat people with more charity, even as the secular world grindingly moves in the opposite direction.
(I can take no credit for any of this; I was raised to have good manners by truly holy and loving Catholic parents, who gave me nine sisters and two brothers.)
It is a salient fact that money sitting in a bank account does nothing to save souls. We believe every dollar we are sent comes from you through God and should be invested prudently and quickly to reach as many people as possible, as soon as possible, with cheerful and creative daring.
Thusly, after your prayerful discernment, if you decide to bequeth stocks, securities, or other property, like all such prior gifts we have received, I promise you these will be liquidated immediately and the proceeds will be deposited into our general operational fund.
You gift, whenever God chooses to bestow it, will pay for rent, electric and heating bills, just wages for our workers, insurance, shipping costs, manufacturing, computer technology, programming, accounting, etc., and, of course, exciting new projects and materials!
More importantly, Our Lady has brought to us the best and most loyal benefactors in the world. A great many of our benefactors stay with us for decades, and after all these years, I know there are many who are now supporting us from heaven. We have had 30-Day Gregorian Masses offered for their souls. We have several hundred contemplative religious sisters in over 130 Poor Clare, Dominican, Benedictine, and Carmelite monasteries in America and Canada praying for all our benefactors and all who read or hear our materials.
Nothing comes of any of our efforts without grace.
In fact, may God grant me that grace, I am eager to enjoy eternity in the august company of each one of our benefactors in eternity, where a trillion years is but a second in an everlasting happiness of union with Jesus, the King of Kings. It is there that you and I will welcome and enjoy the countless souls we have, together, helped convert or receive the grace of salvation through the one true, holy, Catholic and apostlic Church!
Isn't it wonderful how Our Father can multiply the fruits of your lifetime of hard work, divinely-bestowed talents, trust in His Providence, and intelligent investing, that is, your material blessings, into giving so many souls the opportunity to receive priceless spiritual blessings?
I sincerely do not know if you should add our charity to your will, nor should I. All I can do is declare the truth of my direct experience with tens of thousands of generous Catholics over the past thirty years: every person who has joined our work has been sent to us by the Mother of God. Thus I peacefully and warmly invite you prayerful discern if she is moving your heart before deciding to help us continue to reach tens of millions of souls all over the world throughout our fourth decade under her mantle.
Oh, how I thirst for souls! Oh, how I wonder how anyone could thirst for anything else! I stumble forward, failing miserably in attempts to assist the Holy Trinity, Who wants nothing but for every person living on this planet to spend intimate union with Him forever. This is the passion of my life, of my every adult thought. This is the gift placed by Immaculate Mary in my sorrowful soul since I was a very little boy.
Perhaps this too is your calling: to help this fool, and those whom Mary has sent to us, bring the Trinity more souls? Because we have already touched so many people with such modest resources, I have always believed Our Lord foresaw our apostolate as a truly "golden investment" of treasure in heaven for all of our benefactors, great and small.
I am humbled beyond words that you are considering adding our organization to your will. Our partner, Cocatylist, truly does make doing this task simple, secure, and easy, especially if one is not familiar with the process. In our history of doing the impossible, such gifts have played a pivotal role during the launching of life-changing evangelization projects and the development of new free materials.
I do promise that your sacrifice, however, without regard to the amount, will not only be used to fund the innovative new projects we are known for, but that you will also be supporting our many thousands of benefactors who can only afford to offer us their prayers as they distribute millions of our "tools for evangeliztion."
These dedicated benefactors include financially struggling pastors in inner-city and rural Catholic churches, holy elderly who are on fire to evangelize yet barely scrape by on extremely limited Social Security income, prisoners with nothing but a desire to learn about Jesus, and many, many others faithfully enduring periods of hard times in our often heartless secular culture. Our materials really are completely free, and, are always available in large quantities for ridiculously nominal donations.
By the way, do you like our uncluttered, pristinely-designed website, and, did you notice this is due in great part to our permanent policy of rejecting any outsider advertising? (We will never be beholden the compromises that type of so-called "income" entails.)
Additionally, we have never sold or given away anyone's personal information ever, from our very first day in October of 1991 to present, and we never will. Nor we do any so-called "development." We have no "memberships" and no "tiers" or the like. In fact, we budget virtually nothing for fundraising and advertising!
Our free distribution system and the materials themselves, which our benefactors have distributed by the tens of millions, are the advertising.
I sometimes joke with my coworkers that we spend all of our time using up the money God sends us soley on our mission to reach souls, and that we do not spend any of our time raising money so we can "afford" to raise more money!
Every benefactor is a gift from Our Lady, and they humble us every day with their prayers, love of God, and generosity. Immaculate Mary made all these things very clear to me when she gave me the principles on which everything we do here is based. If there is any good or genius or wisdom in our approach, it is hers. This is her way, her apostolate.
Every day, along with my coworkers, I pray for all our benefactors (past, present, and future), especially when I receive Holy Communion. That now includes you and your family. Please pray that our work together forevermore honors Immaculate Mary. I take your leave with one of my favorite quotations, below.
On behalf of all the souls we might influence, thank you.
With Saint Joseph,
Bud Macfarlane
Founder
Our supporters have distributed tens of millions of life-changing Catholic gifts since 1991, making us America's largest producer of high-quality, super-affordable tools for evangelization. Join our work today!
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Meet Bud Macfarlane, Our Founder
