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Vincentian volunteers with St. Raphael's conference of the St. Vincent de Paul Society are pictured unloading donations of food and other essentials to be distributed to the needy in a photo posted to San Rafael parish's Facebook page May 24. The SVdP conference marked its 60th year of serving local people in need the day before. (Photo courtesy St. Raphael Parish Facebook page)
May 28, 2020Christina Gray
Catholic San Francisco
St. Raphael parishioner Frank Lindh reflected on the parish’s longtime “mission of mercy” amid the current public health crisis in an essay he wrote marking the 60th anniversary of its St. Vincent de Paul Society Conference.“Sixty years of steady service to the poor of San Rafael is surely a remarkable milestone,” Lindh wrote in the essay sent to Catholic San Francisco in advance of the May 23 anniversary.
“Although it might seem sad, or even ironic, that the anniversary is occurring in the midst of a terrible pandemic, the fact is that the long record of organized charitable work by the St. Vincent’s Conference at St. Raphael has prepared us well for this moment in history," he said.Current members of the conference marked the anniversary with a Mass streamlined because of the current closure of public Masses in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
On May 23, 1960, parishioners formed the local conference, becoming part of what Lindh called “an old, deeply-ingrained tradition of compassion dating to the parish’s origins as a Spanish mission over 200 years ago."
Sixty years after its launch and in response to material and spiritual needs created by the ongoing pandemic, he said, volunteers with the parish conference are on the premises providing groceries, grocery gift cards, homemade face masks, and “friendly words of encouragement.”
Other Vincentians are off-site responding to requests for help with rent, medical expenses and other needs from client families, he said.
Mission San Rafael was founded in 1817 as a convalescent hospital (asistencia”) for native people from the Mission Dolores Basilica in San Francisco. They were gravely sickened by exposure to European diseases, to which they had little or no immunity.
“It was the pandemic of their time,” said Lindh.
The founding friars made a deliberate choice in naming the new mission in honor of the Archangel Raphael, he said. Raphael is venerated by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike as the patron of good health and is considered a messenger “who announces the healing of God.”
In a separate email, St. Raphael Vincentian Barbara Beaulieu summed up the "Vincentian call."
"The Vincentian vocation is the intimate desire to participate personally and directly in helping the needy through person-to-person contact and by the gift of one's own heart and friendship, doing so within a community of faith of persons each inspired by the same vocation," she said.