Looking for a way to give back and bless others this Christmas? Cross Catholic Outreach’s Christmas Catalog offers you an inspiring way to include effective almsgiving into your family’s Advent and Christmas observances.
Through our Christmas Catalog, you can easily “shop” for the charitable gifts that most touch your heart — items that will help children in need, provide clean water for families in Kenya and more! It’s very much like selecting Christmas gifts from a commercial catalog, but these gifts have a greater impact. By choosing them, you can be someone’s miracle; you can bless impoverished children and families in developing countries around the world!
In this blog, I’ll explain more about Cross Catholic Outreach’s Christmas Catalog gifts and how you can sponsor them to share Christ’s love where it is needed most.
Cross Catholic Outreach’s Christmas Catalog features a variety of gifts to bless children, families and communities in developing countries. Gift categories include:
The Christmas Catalog is an important way Cross Catholic Outreach furthers its vision of mobilizing Catholics to overcome the material and spiritual poverty plaguing so many developing countries. To achieve our vision, we work directly with Catholic bishops, priests, sisters and lay missionaries who live among the poor in developing countries such as Haiti, Guatemala and Malawi.
Many of our overseas partners are eager to make a difference in the communities they serve, but they have lacked the funding needed to carry out their poverty relief and spiritual outreach programs. The Christmas Catalog is designed to bridge this funding gap by giving U.S. Catholics the opportunity to select from 47 gifts that support Church missions and will bless the poor this Christmas.
U.S. Catholics have been helping the poor through Cross Catholic Outreach’s Christmas Catalog for more than a decade. Last Christmas, one of the most popular items was Vitafood, a protein-rich meal packet scientifically formulated to meet the needs of malnourished children. Cross Catholic Outreach ships these Vitafood meals to ministry partners in developing countries, where they can be distributed to hungry children and families. Our Vitafood outreach is a great way to rush nutritious food where it is needed most, and those meals are also vitally important in providing relief after an emergency or natural disaster — a hurricane or earthquake, for example — disrupts a community’s food supply.
Another popular catalog selection highlights our Box of Joy® program. This special Christmas outreach puts smiles on the faces of thousands of precious children by allowing them to open their own boxes full of Christmas gifts. Each box also includes spiritual blessings — a rosary and a special booklet about Jesus and his love for them. For many of these children, Box of Joy is the first Christmas gift they have ever received!
For those interested in having a major impact with their Christmas gift, we recommend the sponsorship of a sturdy new home for a family in desperate need. Our most popular option is safe homes, providing sturdy concrete-block homes with a solid foundation and roof to families living in destitute circumstances. This Christmas, we are excited to partner with ministries to build 50 homes for families in Haiti.
If your goal is to help ensure children no longer miss school due to waterborne illnesses, you should considering helping the Catholic Church in Kenya build and repair wells in remote regions, saving thousands of vulnerable men, women and children through the gift of clean water.
Or perhaps you are passionate about helping our Catholic leaders bring an end to the suffering caused by human trafficking. By supporting ministry partners in the Philippines, you can directly impact anti-trafficking efforts and remind young women of their God-given dignity.
The annual Christmas Catalog offers Catholic families many inspiring and impactful options for sponsoring a truly meaningful Christmas gift—one that will address real and urgent needs. Be sure to browse the Christmas Catalog online and give to whichever projects the Lord places on your heart. With your help, we can reach more needy families than ever before, blessing them with material aid and the spiritual joy of knowing our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Donations from this campaign will be used to cover any expenditures for this project incurred through June 30, 2027, the close of our ministry’s fiscal year. In the event that more funds are raised than needed to fully fund the project, the excess funds, if any, will be used to meet the most urgent needs of the ministry.
