Mai Luong is the founder and current President of Fatima Outreach Foundation and the founder of the Beggars of Christ Movement.

She serves as a lay Beggars of Christ missionary, dedicating her life to missionary service, human trafficking prevention and restoration, and bringing the healing mercy of Jesus Christ to those who are wounded, vulnerable, forgotten, and in need.

Mai is also the author of several spiritual writings developed from the spirituality and mission of the Beggars of Christ, including Meditations of the Beggars of Christ, Rule of Life for the Beggars of Christ, True Steps to Becoming a Lay Beggars of Christ Missionary, The Humility of the Beggars of Christ, What Is Spiritual Trafficking?, and several Beggars of Christ prayers and spiritual meditations.

About Mai Luong

Her journey did not begin with a plan to start an organization. It began with a call, a quiet but persistent call from God that she could not ignore.

Mai came to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee in 1981. Like many refugees, she carried with her the experience of leaving behind one life and beginning another. Over the years, she built a life in America, but deep within her heart, there remained a longing for something more. She desired to know God more deeply and to understand what He wanted from her life.

In 2004, Mai experienced two separate moments in prayer that would profoundly change the direction of her life. On two different occasions, while praying before the Tabernacle, she heard within her heart the same call from Jesus:

“If you truly love Me, leave everything and follow Me.”

The first time, Mai was deeply moved, but she did not fully understand what Jesus was asking of her. When the same call came to her again on another occasion, she could no longer dismiss it as simply a passing thought. She believed Jesus was personally inviting her to surrender her life more completely to Him.

She still did not know where He was leading her or what “leave everything and follow Me” would eventually mean. Believing that perhaps God was calling her to religious life, Mai began discerning with religious communities. This eventually led her to enter the Visitation Monastery in Georgetown and later to continue her discernment with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Washington, D.C.

During this period of discernment, something unusual began happening. Mai repeatedly had the same dream.

In the dream, she knew she was somewhere in Asia. Everyone around her was Asian. She was standing at the corner of a street beside a wet market. The roads met at a crossroads, and the streets were made of reddish clay. She could see the people, the market, the road, and the place where she was standing. The dream returned again and again.

At the time, she did not understand why.

Eventually, Mai came to understand that although God had allowed her to experience religious life, He was leading her along a different path. Her calling to leave everything and follow Christ would not unfold in the way she had originally imagined.

Years later, that mysterious dream would return to her, not while she was sleeping, but while she was awake.

In 2018, Mai made a pilgrimage to Fatima, Portugal. During that pilgrimage, she experienced a profound sense of peace and a renewed desire to surrender her life completely to God. That journey eventually led her to northern Vietnam, where she traveled into the mountainous region near the Chinese border to serve among the poor and vulnerable.

Then came a moment she would never forget.

While in northern Vietnam, Mai found herself standing at the corner of a street beside an open wet market. She looked around. The people were Asian. The roads intersected before her. The reddish clay, the market, the street corner, even the place where she was standing seemed strangely familiar.

She had seen this place before.

It was the place from her recurring dream.

For Mai, this was not simply a coincidence. She received that moment personally as a confirmation from God, an answer to something He had placed before her many years earlier. The dream she could not understand during her religious discernment suddenly seemed to have meaning. She believed God had been preparing her heart for a mission she had not yet known.

During her missionary experiences, Mai encountered poverty, suffering, and the heartbreaking reality of human trafficking. She encountered vulnerable women and young people whose dignity had been wounded by exploitation, poverty, abandonment, and circumstances beyond their control. These encounters changed her deeply.

She began to understand that her calling was not simply to go somewhere and perform charitable works. It was to be present to those who were suffering, to recognize Christ in them, and to help restore hope and human dignity wherever God opened the door.

In 2019, Mai founded Fatima Outreach Foundation as a charitable response to that calling. The mission grew from a desire to serve those who are poor, vulnerable, forgotten, exploited, or wounded, particularly through human trafficking prevention and survivor restoration, missionary outreach, and assistance to people in need.

Alongside this work, another spirituality was quietly developing in her heart, the spirituality that would become known as the Beggars of Christ.

At its center is a simple truth that Mai herself continues to learn: before we can bring Christ to others, we must first recognize our own poverty before God. We come to Jesus as beggars, completely dependent upon His mercy, His healing, and His grace. Only after allowing Him to work within us can we carry His mercy to another person.

The years that followed were not easy. The mission passed through periods of tremendous hardship, misunderstanding, betrayal, loss, and suffering. There were moments when much of what had been built seemed to disappear. Mai also experienced painful personal losses and the deaths of people deeply important to her, including her spiritual director, her mother, and her best friend.

Before his death, her spiritual director, Father Richard Cortese, left her with words that remained deeply planted in her heart:

“Keep your faith. God the Father has a special plan for you.”

Those words became especially meaningful during the years when Mai could not understand what God was allowing.

Yet through everything, the desire to serve never disappeared.

For Mai, mission is not simply a project or an organization. It has become part of the way she understands her life. She believes that every wounded person still possesses God given dignity, that no human being should be treated as disposable, and that even after profound suffering, hope can be restored.

Today, Mai continues rebuilding and carrying forward the work of Fatima Outreach Foundation while continuing to discern the developing spirituality and missionary vocation of the Beggars of Christ. The road has been very different from the one she once imagined when she first knelt before the Tabernacle many years ago.

Looking back, however, she can see a thread running through it all, from a Vietnamese refugee beginning a new life in America, to a call before the Tabernacle, to religious discernment, to a recurring dream of a reddish clay road beside a market somewhere in Asia, and finally to standing on that very road years later.

She does not claim to understand everything God has permitted along the way. She simply continues trying to answer the same invitation she first heard in her heart many years ago:

“If you truly love me, Leave everything and follow Me.”

Her prayer remains one of surrender:

Jesus, I trust in You. Lead me wherever You want me to go. Let everything I am and everything I do be for Your glory and for the souls You place before me.

All for Jesus, Through Jesus, with Jesus, and in Jesus.