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When Father Francisco Valdovinos died of COVID-19 aged 58, his congregants did something very unusual: they got vaccinated.
Scrolling back to the months before his death during the pandemic last year, Valdovinos transformed the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish into a food distribution center and testing site.
He gave out thousands of masks, offered socially distanced Masses, spoke on the media and urged listeners to take the pandemic seriously and to get the vaccine once it was available.
When COVID-19 struck Valdovinos, parishioners held vigils outside the hospital. Over 1,000 people prayed during a Facebook Live session.
“The community cried when he died,” says one parishioner.
“He went above and beyond what most priests ever do. He could’ve just given Communion at Mass and that would’ve been fine. But he pushed everyone to do more. His legacy is now in our hearts.”
There are no public memorials to Valdovinos. The most lasting tribute to him is the community’s vaccination rate. After he died, residents of the desert town of Mecca, California, vowed to roll up their sleeves in his honor. And they did.
Recent data show 93% of residents in the Mecca and surrounding districts are fully vaccinated. This is unusual – only 4% of people in the same zip-code district have achieved 90% full vaccination.
“When Father Valdovinos died, he awakened the consciousness of the people in our community to go out there and get the shot,” says one parishioner. “For their health, yes, but also out of respect for his life.”
“He was just building momentum,” another says. “It’s just a big loss — we don’t know what he could’ve done. So we need to continue what he did.”
Valdovinos was a member of the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity (also known as Trinity Missions), a Catholic men’s congregation devoted to poor and marginalized communities, came to his hometown.
He was ordained in 1994, and ministered in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica before finding his social justice groove in Tallahassee, where he’d drive more than 300 miles on weekends to visit labor camps and prisons across northern Florida.
When he moved to Mecca, he used his own social service networks to supplement Mecca’s existing ones – connections that were vital as the pandemic hit.
His parish church distributed more than 250,000 pounds (about 113,000 kilos) of food last year. The masked Valdovinos handing out bags of groceries to families or moving stacks of sacks and boxes made him a regular on local English- and Spanish-language television broadcasts.
Two days after Valdovinos died, Trinity Missions released a short video in his memory that’s as close to a personal manifesto as Valdovinos ever offered.
From inside his Our Lady of Guadalupe church, he declared: “You can preach. But we need to show, with action.”
Source
- Los Angeles Times
- Image: KESQ
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