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Father Tom Martin is pastor of St. Pius Parish in Redwood City.
March 23, 2020
Nicholas Wolfram Smith
Amid a shutdown that has brought the Bay Area to a standstill, Father Thomas Martin said he hopes as pastor he can reassure people and provide some calm during a critical time in their lives.
“It’s really important to recognize that the church is a spiritual community,” said Father Martin, pastor of St. Pius parish in Redwood City. “We are truly united through the Eucharist. We’re not just an amalgamation of activities.”
Since March 16, San Mateo County, along with the rest of the Bay Area, has issued shelter-in-place orders that have closed most public spaces and prevented gatherings, including religious ones. Father Martin said that since the order came through, he, the parish staff and fellow clergy have tried to spiritually support parishioners under the current restrictions.The tension the parish has had to balance is keeping close to people when everyone needs to maintain distance, responding to the needs of the faithful while being responsible in upholding public health. Father Martin praised the parish’s staff for being proactive in determining the parish’s response to the shutdown, and added that the collaborative decision-making culture had been an enormous help as the parish faced temporary closure.
St. Pius has begun streaming Mass every day of the week in English and Spanish, in addition to a rosary novena and evening prayer. The parish also offers reconciliation for two hours each Saturday in the church vestibule, encouraging people to practice social distancing as they wait.
While there was some initial anxiety from parishioners after the parish closed, he said understanding the health risks involved with keeping parishes open has made people appreciate the action. Father Martin said people also understand the spiritual aspect of the parish closures that Archbishop Cordileone highlighted, that it was a charitable act to make sure lives were not endangered.
As a pastor, Father Martin said shuttering the public celebration of Mass has emphasized for him how important the Eucharist is to parishioners, and how hurtful it can be to not have access to it.
”We had some heartbreaking phone calls from people today seeking to receive the Eucharist and it was really edifying that people take their faith so seriously,” he said. In addition, the pastor hopes through the shelter in place order Catholics come to understand how the Eucharist and and prayer unite the church spiritually.The parish has also been working how to support people who are vulnerable during the lockdown with grocery deliveries or check-ins over the phone. “I don’t want people to feel afraid and isolated,” he said. “This is a pretty tight-knit community, people know each other. Everyone is doing their part, and as frightening as this time is, I’m really reassured and grateful that people are handling this well,” he said.
With the church closed for liturgies, parish collections have taken an inevitable hit. There is a legitimate concern over the parish’s finances, Father Martin said, but it takes second place to pastoral worry over how parishioners were doing.
“I’m not being pollyannaish -- I’m worried about the infrastructure of the parish, but I'm less concerned about that than making sure that people are physically, mentally, and spiritually well. If we maintain that, things will be well,” he said.
Parishioners have already reached out for help, as families have struggled to provide food for their children and parents cried over layoffs. As he shopped at Safeway in the days before the shelter-in-place came into effect -- “total bedlam,” he said -- Father Martin chatted with an elderly woman who told him that despite living through the Great Depression and World War II, she had never witnessed anything like she saw at the grocery store that day. She asked him what he did, and after replying that he was a Catholic priest, she told him, “You’re needed now more than ever.”
The 9/11 attacks are the last touchstone people have for such a sudden cataclysmic change in society. Father Martin, who was working for San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown at the time, said he remembered that for a while, churches were packed and the pace of life slowed down. After a month, it was back to business as usual.
“This is different because it affects everyone directly, and I'm hoping people learn from this,” he said. “There's too much hype, too much running around, let’s reorient ourselves.”
In his homily at Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Father Martin spoke of the crisis as a desert journey and a opportunity for living in Christ more intentionally.
"It is a time to get out of ourselves, to get away from what Robert Cardinal Sarah calls the 'dictatorship of noise,'" he said in homily notes posted on the parish website. "It is a time of sacrifice and giving in some very practical ways: our Saint Pius Women’s Club: donations to Streetlight Ministries and Faith in Action ministry preparing meals for those in need."
He said the three pillars of Lent -- prayer, almsgiving and fasting -- "are being lived in a quite visceral way as we deal both locally and globally with the coronavirus pandemic."
He acknowledged fear of the known and unknown but also urged the faithful to embrace "a privileged time of grace as the Lord invites us to slow down just a bit and consider His presence in our lives.
"We are consoled by the Psalmist who exclaimed, “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want,'" Father Martin said.
"In a very real and tangible way," he said, "this pandemic has forced us to dwell in the desert, even if only for a time. The desert is much a spiritual state of mind as it is a specific place."