Mai Luong, Founder of Fatima Outreach Foundation and Beggars of Christ
Mai Luong is the founder of Fatima Outreach Foundation and the founder of Beggars of Christ, a developing Catholic-inspired missionary community and spirituality. Her journey of faith, missionary service, suffering, healing, and restoration grew from a deep desire to give her life completely to Jesus Christ and to bring His mercy to those who are wounded, vulnerable, forgotten, or in need.
Mai came to America as a refugee in early 1981. Over the years, she pursued her education, including studies in Strategic Management, and entered the business world. Although she experienced professional and entrepreneurial success, something within her remained unfulfilled. Deep within her heart, she felt God calling her to something more, a life given more completely to Him.
A Call to Follow Christ
In 2004, while praying before the Tabernacle, Mai entered a profound period of spiritual discernment. On two separate occasions, she experienced within her heart the call:
“If you truly love Me, leave everything and follow Me.”
Those words remained with her.
Seeking to understand God’s will for her life, Mai discerned religious life with several religious communities, including the Visitation Monastery in Georgetown and later the Little Sisters of the Poor in Washington, D.C.
Her journey eventually led her beyond the walls of religious life and into missionary and charitable service among vulnerable and underserved communities.
Over the years, Mai participated in charitable and missionary outreach in the United States and abroad, including Jamaica, Belize, Israel, Vietnam, Rwanda, and Uganda. These experiences brought her face to face with poverty, vulnerable children, human suffering, and the devastating reality of human trafficking.
Each encounter deepened a question already stirring within her heart: How could she give more of her life to God and to those who were suffering?
Founding Fatima Outreach Foundation
A pilgrimage to Fatima, Portugal, in 2018 became an important turning point in Mai’s missionary journey. That same year, she traveled to Vietnam and became involved in outreach connected with people affected by human trafficking.
What she encountered remained deeply within her heart.
Through prayer and these missionary experiences, Mai began discerning the establishment of a charitable organization dedicated to serving vulnerable people and helping restore dignity and hope to those who had suffered.
Mai Luong founded Fatima Outreach Foundation, which was formally incorporated in Virginia in March 2019 and subsequently recognized as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
The Foundation was established to carry forward charitable and missionary outreach, including human trafficking prevention and restoration, assistance to vulnerable communities, and other works of compassion.
Founding Beggars of Christ
As the mission developed, something else was quietly taking shape within Mai’s spiritual life.
She began developing a spirituality centered upon surrender to Jesus Christ, poverty of spirit, Divine Mercy, healing, obedience, and complete dependence upon Divine Providence.
In 2020, Mai Luong began the Beggars of Christ, a developing Catholic-inspired missionary spirituality and community rooted in the desire to surrender everything to Jesus Christ and become an instrument of His healing mercy.
At the heart of the spirituality is a simple progression. Before a person can bring healing to others, she must first allow Christ to enter and heal her own heart. She must then faithfully live the vocation God has entrusted to her within her family and community. From there, she can go forth to serve others as an instrument of Christ’s mercy.
Beggars of Christ is currently developing and discerning its mission and spirituality. It should not be understood as having received formal ecclesiastical recognition or approval as a Catholic religious institute or association.
Beggars of Christ Refuge
In April 2021, Fatima Outreach Foundation purchased approximately 400 acres of property in West Tennessee. The property became known as the Beggars of Christ Refuge.
The Refuge was envisioned as a peaceful place for prayer, missionary life, charitable outreach, and the restoration and support of people affected by human trafficking and other forms of suffering.
For Mai, the Refuge represented far more than land.
It represented years of prayer, sacrifice, generosity, and hope. It was a place where she envisioned wounded lives finding peace, missionaries serving God, and people discovering that their suffering did not have to define their future.
Then Mai’s own life was shattered.
A Season of Profound Suffering
While serving at the mission, Mai endured a deeply traumatic experience when she was raped.
At a time when she desperately needed compassion, stability, and support, Mai says she instead experienced hostility and bullying from members of the very Board of Directors she had personally selected and entrusted with helping safeguard the mission.
The conflict surrounding the mission intensified.
Mai was eventually removed from the mission property and lost access to the Foundation’s financial resources and other assets. She maintains that Fatima Outreach Foundation’s funds, property, and other assets were wrongfully taken from the mission or placed beyond her control.
The Foundation subsequently lost control of the approximately 400-acre Beggars of Christ Refuge through a property transfer that Mai disputes and alleges was unauthorized and fraudulent. Efforts have followed to recover the Foundation’s property and assets.
Within a remarkably short period of time, Mai went from leading the mission she had helped build to finding herself homeless and nearly penniless, while still carrying the trauma of rape.
The ordeal did not end there.
As the conflict continued, criminal accusations were also made against Mai. She was charged with two felony offenses and had to return to the community where the mission property was located and surrender herself to authorities.
Mai experienced the criminal accusations as another attempt to intimidate and silence her during an already devastating period of her life.
Nevertheless, she returned and submitted herself to the legal process.
At the preliminary hearing, the felony charges against her were dismissed, and the cases were subsequently expunged.
For Mai, that moment brought profound gratitude.
Praise be to God.
She had endured the trauma of rape, displacement from the mission, the loss of access to its property and financial resources, homelessness, severe financial hardship, and the fear and humiliation of facing criminal accusations.
Yet she continued to stand.
The pain was not merely financial or legal. She felt profoundly betrayed by people she had personally trusted with the mission and its charitable purpose.
Through the fear, uncertainty, and humiliation of that period, Mai continued to place her trust in Jesus Christ. When she could not defend everything that was being said or done around her, she sought to entrust the truth to God.
Misunderstood Within the Church
Another wound came from a place especially close to Mai’s heart.
According to Mai, members of the Board communicated allegations about her to the local Catholic bishop that she maintains were false or materially inaccurate.
Mai subsequently received a reprimand from the bishop based on information that, in her account, did not include her full perspective or the circumstances surrounding what had occurred.
For Mai, this was particularly painful.
Her Catholic faith was at the center of her life. She loved the Church and respected its spiritual authority. To feel misunderstood within the Church while already carrying the trauma of rape, conflict within the mission, displacement, homelessness, financial hardship, and criminal accusations added another wound.
Yet Mai did not want this experience to separate her from the Catholic Church or from Jesus Christ.
She continued to pray.
She entrusted the truth, her reputation, and the future of the mission to God, believing that He knew the fullness of what had happened even when she felt misunderstood by others.
Her desire was not to fight against the Church, but to remain faithful and obedient to Christ, to respect the authority of the Church, to seek healing, and to continue discerning how God was calling her to serve.
Then came another loss.
“Keep Your Faith”
Only a few months later, Mai experienced another devastating loss when her beloved spiritual director and confidant, Fr. Richard Cortese, died suddenly.
His death came without the opportunity to prepare for the loss. He had accompanied Mai spiritually and had been a source of guidance, encouragement, and stability through important periods of her journey.
Among the final words he spoke to Mai were words she would carry with her through everything that followed:
“Keep your faith. God the Father has a special plan for you.”
After his sudden death, those words took on an even deeper meaning.
At a time when so much of Mai’s life had been shaken, she no longer had her spiritual director beside her to help her understand the road ahead. Yet the final counsel he had given her remained:
Keep your faith.
Only a few months later, Mai suffered yet another heartbreaking loss when her closest friend died from lung cancer.
This was the friend who had faithfully stood beside her through difficult seasons, listened when she needed someone to listen, encouraged her when she struggled, and remained present through some of the hardest moments of her life.
Within a relatively short period of time, Mai had endured rape, conflict within the mission, the loss of access to the Foundation’s property and resources, eviction, homelessness, severe financial hardship, criminal accusations, feeling misunderstood within the Church, the sudden death of her spiritual director, and the death of her closest friend.
One earthly source of security after another seemed to disappear.
Yet one thing remained.
Jesus Christ.
Becoming a Beggar of Christ
The words Beggars of Christ were no longer simply the name of a developing missionary spirituality.
Mai found herself being called to live them.
She had spoken about surrender.
Now she had to surrender.
She had spoken about Divine Providence.
Now she had to depend upon it.
She had spoken about Christ’s healing.
Now she needed that healing herself.
When human security disappeared, she learned to depend more deeply upon God.
When she did not know what would happen next, she prayed.
When grief overwhelmed her, she surrendered.
When her wounds were deeper than she knew how to heal, she brought them to Jesus.
When she felt misunderstood, she entrusted the truth to God.
And when she felt she had almost nothing left to give, she gave Him herself.
Again and again, the final words of her spiritual director returned to her:
“Keep your faith. God the Father has a special plan for you.”
The suffering did not extinguish Mai’s desire to love God and serve Him with her whole being.
It deepened it.
She began to understand more fully that a Beggar of Christ comes before God with empty hands, recognizing that everything ultimately belongs to Him and trusting that His grace remains sufficient even when earthly security disappears.
From Woundedness to Healing
Mai does not believe that suffering itself is the mission.
Healing is.
Slowly, Mai believes that God began healing the wounds that had accumulated through those years.
The woman who had spent years wanting to help restore wounded lives now understood, in a deeply personal way, what it meant to need restoration herself.
She understood the pain of being violated.
She understood what it meant to lose a home.
She understood betrayal.
She understood grief.
She understood what it was like to have very little and wonder what would happen next.
She understood what it meant to feel misunderstood and still choose faith.
And through those experiences, her desire to accompany wounded people became even more personal.
Mai believes that Jesus Christ can enter even the most wounded places of a person’s life and bring healing, mercy, meaning, and renewed hope.
What appeared to be an ending gradually became another beginning.
God was not simply rebuilding the mission.
Mai believes He was rebuilding the missionary herself.
A Mission That Continues
The loss of the Refuge did not end Fatima Outreach Foundation, nor did it extinguish the developing spirituality of Beggars of Christ.
Mai Luong continues working to rebuild and develop the charitable mission of Fatima Outreach Foundation while nurturing the spirituality of Beggars of Christ.
The work continues with a particular concern for human trafficking prevention and restoration, charitable outreach, missionary service, mental health peer support, and assistance to people in need.
Her own journey has strengthened a conviction that has become central to the mission:
Those who are wounded should never be abandoned, and suffering does not have to be the final chapter of a person’s life.
At the heart of Mai’s work remains the same desire that first drew her before the Tabernacle many years ago: to belong completely to Jesus Christ and to offer her life in His service.
Mai’s continuing mission is to glorify God by becoming an instrument of Christ’s healing mercy and to bring hope, compassion, restoration, and the love of Jesus Christ to those who are wounded, vulnerable, forgotten, or in need.
Restoring What Was Wounded.
Renewing What Was Lost.
Returning Hope Through Christ.
