[Fr. Vigoa] Let us pray to the lord.
[Crowd] Lord, hear our prayers.
[Fr. Vigoa] For all those who are suffering from the coronavirus or other illnesses,
may Christ, the divine physician, bring them healing. Let us pray.
[Pam] Father Richard Vigoa is the pastor of Saint Augustine Church and Catholic Student Center at the University of Miami
in Coral Gables. After contracting COVID-19 himself early on in the pandemic,
Father Vigoa is using his shared experience with the virus to better connect with his congregation.
Did you feel somewhat of a solidarity maybe with some of the parishioners who got it because
we can talk about it sort of in abstract terms but then to actually go through it. It's very different, right?
That's one of the the silver linings I think of this is that because I got COVID,
there was this at least as a priest to be able to relate to people and be in solidarity with someone
who's sick or a family member who's sick or how scary it is that you have COVID. As i said, some
of our parishioners that had died and be able to talk and counsel with some of the parishioners
was very powerful because until you get it you really don't know the effects of it.
After you recovered, you were able to donate plasma. Why did you want to do that and what was that like?
I remember saying to myself as soon as I feel better I want to donate plasma, I just want to give back.
And we had a deacon here in the Archdiocese of Miami that was very sick who is my same blood type
and I called up and I said am I eligible to do this. I went through all and they said "yeah,
let's do it, let's donate plasma." So I was able to do that. I think it's a beautiful thing, it's
the gift of life. I was encouraging parishioners, anyone if you've had COVID, give plasma.
I'm sure it was really stressful too because you kept thinking when am I going to get better
because I need to get back to work.
It was very stressful and then also too you have to wait until you
have two negative tests so that was kind of, okay so now I feel good when am I going to start
testing negative, when I can go back and now you're starting to feel better and you're antsy
to get back to work. And we were still shut down but there was a lot to do and while we were
shut down, I was sick, my brain's going okay how do we, how do we make this happen?
People are at home but we still want to contact our parishioners and be in touch so how do we do this?
Before COVID, one of the things that I wanted to do and I've been stressing it, my mission
statement was the new evangelization. What does that mean? And the new evangelization
is preaching the same gospel with different mediums, with ardor, with excitement and so
before COVID, we had this whole plan of how we're going to do the new evangelization.
I was reluctant to do the digital evangelization. I thought we'll get there, we'll see if there's the
need for that, to kind of tape the masses, a podcast and then COVID hits and we went to masses online.
And so that was a decision we made early on to live stream everything, every function that we did,
talks, forums, parish hall. We wanted to create an online community where we were really connecting
parishioners and people felt that although I can't be on campus, I still know what's going on.
From that, we did service outreaches and we would go out to people's homes
so the digital evangelization has really helped us fortify what we already had going on.
It was the spiritual component was already strong, it was something that people loved.
[Pam] So give us a sense too of where these new cameras are located because they're really
out of the way before you said everything with so many cables on the floor.
[Fr. Vigoa] Oh yeah.
[Pam] it was really you know in the way and now...
[Fr. Vigoa] But it's incredible because they're in the back of the church we have one here on the side of the church and it has the
capacity to move and shift and rotate and so it can capture the procession coming in,
so these are very high-tech cameras and we're just blessed to have them.
[Pam] Saint Augustine Church streams its masses on their app where you can also access classes, other ministries,
town halls and the show 'Bless This Kitchen,' which gives Father Vigoa the chance
to get to know his parishioners like Bea and John Harriman.
All of this has really helped keep us in touch and
obviously the church is reopened, glory to god, here in Florida so that has allowed us to return
but obviously we've had to social distance, wear masks, be very careful and respectful of others
and make sure that nothing happens that could cause you know any problem for the church.
[Bea] And we are also very involved in serving at St. Augustine as eucharistic ministers and as electors.
And of course, we needed that daily reinforcement, it's just been such a comfort to
be able to pray together with other people, even if we're just spiritually connected and to feel that
unity that we need it so much.
[Fr. Vigoa] John and Beatrice, welcome to Bless This Kitchen!
[Bea] Father has been great. Father Vigoa has been wonderful about keeping that torch of faith alive
and that evangelization objective which is one of Saint Augustine's strengths
with the UM students and our parishioners.
Have you had other parish, priests reach out to you and say how are you, what are you doing?
I want some of that, I want to do that here.
Yeah actually I have. I've had some of my brother priest who have come and said,
"what's going on I hear such great things?" And it's not about me, it's if you put the work in, it's going to happen.
I've always said that the secret sauce of any priest or pastor or evangelizer is the ministry of presence.
In the name of the Father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit.
Being available celebrating all the masses, celebrating the liturgies. Being accessible
to people and i think that that catches on and people feel the sense of belonging because here's
someone who cares and wants you to be part of this family.
And because COVID has kept us apart, even you and I are sitting six feet apart, we were quarantined for so long.
Have you seen more so than ever before how people really want to connect and when they do get to be even in the
same space with each other, how much they appreciate that.
Yeah and I've seen both sides. One side is where people are afraid to approach and to engage and that's sad and I'm
hoping that we get to a place where COVID is no more and we begin to integrate each other because
we're social beings and we need that interaction. There is a sense of coming together and we're
still, we feel good in the same space and we're learning how to be social beings, we wear our mask,
we social distance but we're learning to live in this reality that we're in for right now.
And here at St. Augustine is the student center for the University of Miami so what's that like
been during COVID and a lot of these students didn't get to have a graduation, it's been hard.
That's one of the aspects that's the saddest part where we have high school seniors who don't have
a graduation, we have university students that are coming on campus for the first time and
so they're missing out on the big orientation and all of the parties that they did with the staff
and introductions. We would host different get-togethers and that didn't happen and so that's hard.
One of the things that we're trying to do at the University of Miami is we're doing
outdoor events and we're inviting the kids to come and to ask questions to be involved
and I think that that's been working. We did, recently we did an outdoor concert
and we got kids from all denominations and no denominations come and join us so we're trying
to be creative where we can invite university students because a lot of them are also
wanting to quarantine or stay their parents are asking them, "hey I don't want you in large groups
I don't want you out in parties" and so we're trying to think outside the box
to minister to them as well.
As a pastor I'm sure you've had a lot of people come to you who are, they're depressed, they have a lot of anxiety,
they're tired of dealing with this or they're just sad. So how do you pastor them? What do you say to them?
That is a reality that we're dealing with right now that is
very serious, we're dealing with a lot of people with depression, with anxiety,
sense of loss and also an older population where their adult children are saying to them, "listen,
I don't want you to go to mass, I don't want you to go to the grocery store, I don't want you out and about"
but it's creating where we have an older generation who are finding themselves
very lonely and very depressed. So something like our online masses and the different things
that we're doing on different platforms has helped. I would say to someone who is dealing with that is
you need to connect to your faith community, you need to have a prayer life, you need to
have that relationship with the lord that's going to sustain you and feed you. We're not going to be
able to do it by ourselves. There is a truth that lies outside of ourselves and when we come to
understand that, we can draw from that strength and that helps us on our daily journey.
What about somebody who's watching this right now and they're not
catholic, maybe they don't even go to a church or have a religious life
but they're hurting and they want to do something, I mean what would you say to someone like that?
I would say reach out to someone even if you don't feel like it or if you don't want to, someone that
is a family member, a friend, maybe someone that you know that has a faith component in their life.
If you're alone and you're stuck you need to reach out.
After the whole Black Lives Matter marches started to happen, after George Floyd was killed,
you got together here in the parish, all the parishioners of color and Black Catholics came together to talk about this, right?
There was a little girl that comes here with her parents, a white couple who adopted a pair of twins,
two black kids, and the little girl, who's just absolutely beautiful, she says to her mom, she said
"Mom, are there no black people in heaven?" And the mom said, "What? What are you talking about? Of course."
She says, "I never see any saints that are black," and her mom said that to me and I was just floored.
I could not believe that. And so one of the things that I did immediately was I looked up, there's
six Black Americans who are on the road to sainthood so I put up this big banner with
these signs and pictures that said 'Celebrating Black Catholics on the Road to Sainthood' and
so we put them up on the wall so this little girl could see it.
During that time when we were seeing a lot of the protests and the marches and so i thought it was very important for
our Black Catholics to have a voice and to be heard and so we did that. We had a forum where
we just spoke. We wanted to hear the experience of different Black Catholics in our own parish
and allow them to have a space to to talk.
[Parishioner] The awareness during this time is so important
and we want everyone to understand this is not a moment, it's a movement.
[Fr. Vigoa] And it was something that was healing, it was something beautiful,
and a lot of parishioners said I learned so much that night.
That's amazing, so that's certainly something to continue, don't you think? To keep that going.
Exactly right and what I've learned from it is is that we need more black catholics in positions of leadership
and because presence we need to be, we need to be seen.
This has been a crazy year, not only with COVID but also with the social justice movement, the election
there's a lot of heaviness weighing on everybody so, and now we're getting towards the end of the year,
how can we handle that? We're hopeful for a 2021 but what should we be thinking about right now?
We need to look at 2020 say where can I learn from 2020 and my suggestion would be is
a position of thanksgiving, of blessings. We have our health, we have our family, we need to heal some
divisions, we need to heal some brokenness that perhaps is in my own life or in my family's life,
but I think it has to be from a point of departure of just thanksgiving, of feeling blessed
and fortunate and when you approach the world in that way, I think it just kind of comes together
and you see it differently because your response to the other is going to be different the way that
you look at the world is going to be a little bit different and 2020 can teach us a lot if
we're able to just to sit back and say we need to grow from this and we need to love each other.