A recently appointed Park Slope priest is ousting a volunteer-run food pantry that serves around 400 families every month from the space it has used for more than three decades at Saint Augustine. It’s the latest instance of the newly installed church leadership forcing out community groups, according to longtime parishioners.
In a note sent out to volunteers at the food pantry on Feb. 20, Father Frank Tumino said the weekly pantry’s last day will be March 16. The decision to force the Helping Hands Food Pantry to close, he said, came with a “heavy heart” and “after considerable prayer, reflection.” Tumino said the pantry volunteers had failed to comply with church-mandated training around the protection of children, and the institution had a “lack of sufficient resources to maintain and oversee” the pantry.
But volunteers say they complied with the church’s rigid training requirements, and that costs for the church to run the pantry — whose $50,000 budget is funded through city grants and individual donations — are minimal.
“The church pays for nothing, except for the electricity that we use,” said Tom Wargo, a volunteer at the pantry, who said the pantry operation had paid the church $5,000 last year at Tumino’s request.
“We open up ourselves. We close ourselves. We clean everything ourselves. It’s all volunteer run,” Wargo said. “He just wants us out.”
Several parishioners who spoke with THE CITY describe the pantry closure as the latest casualty since Tumino took over the dwindling Saint Augustine and Saint Francis Xavier Park Slope parishes in late 2021.
He canceled an annual Christmas party for the children of incarcerated parents that the church had hosted for a decade, raised the rent tenfold on a biweekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and ended a monthly dinner for people with AIDS and their families, several parishoners said. Many of the programs were so-called ministries – volunteer-run efforts by church parishioners who aim to put their faith into practice through community service.
“Every single program has been pushed out,” said Ellen Edelman, who hosts the children’s Christmas party and moved it to a Catholic church in an adjacent parish after Tumino’s secretary informed her the event was no longer welcome there, she said.
“We just don’t want you, period, we’re not a parish program,” Edelman recalled being told. “It had been there for a dozen years.”
A local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous that had used the church hall for around five years had its rent for two meetings a week jacked up from to $800 a month from $80, according to group organizer Mychal McNicholas.
“We just left,” he said. “The pastor wears a white collar that says feed the hungry, take care of the sick and the lame, and he’s throwing us in the street.”
The monthly dinner for people with AIDS and their families, which had used the church hall for years, was blocked from returning after the pandemic.
“Saint Augustine suffers from a severe financial situation and deferred maintenance that makes outreach next to impossible at the present moment,” a parish secretary wrote in an email, shared with THE CITY, telling the group they couldn’t return. “Saint Augustine does not have the available funds to meet utilities and insurance, let alone provide staff to open buildings for use.”
John Quaglione, a spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, said that under Tumino’s watch the number of people attending weekly sermons had doubled to around 500. Tumino took over in late 2021, just as people were returning to in-person gatherings following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Despite a critical financial situation at Saint Augustine, Father Tumino has worked to ensure that the historic Saint Augustine continues to exist as a faith community. He worked to ensure that a serious financial concern would be addressed allowing this work to continue,” Quaglione said.
“Father Tumino has exhibited no pattern of alienation. Rather quite the opposite, he has worked to find ways to incorporate various divergent approaches to ensure the future of the traditionally service-oriented Catholic community at Saint Augustine-Saint Francis Xavier.”
‘These Parishes Have Been Decimated’
Catholic churches nationwide have struggled with declining membership in recent decades along with ballooning financial woes. Hundreds of sex abuse lawsuits were filed against the Brooklyn Diocese alone, under New York’s 2019 Child Victims Act.
Rapid gentrification and demographic shifts in Park Slope have put further stress on congregations there. In 2020, the Brooklyn diocese merged Saint Augustine and Saint Francis Xavier, two churches six blocks away from each other, as part of a plan to consolidate resources that dated back to 2011.
Before Tumino’s arrival, Saint Augustine had already ended sermons in Spanish and French Creole, losing small but dedicated groups of Haitian and Latino congregants who drifted to other churches with services in their preferred language.
Father Tumino, who had a past career as a Wall Street banker before becoming a priest, spoke frankly about the church’s financial struggles at a sermon following the theft of its $2 million gold tabernacle in 2022.
“Understand: These parishes have been decimated,” he said, the New York Times reported. “These parishes need between $10 million and $15 million worth of work. I’ve been entrusted with doing that, and there is not that money available, so you have to choose what you can pick and do now.”
While parishioners say they are sympathetic to the church’s financial woes, many said they were perplexed about why Father Tumino would try to eliminate programs run for years by some of the most dedicated members of the church community. His actions prompted speculation and inspired jokes that Tumino might want to turn St. Augustine into an event space or a disco. Even people who voiced their sympathies about his difficult position seemed to think the aim might be to close the church.
“Tumino is overextended,” said Jim O’Callahan, who runs a volunteer operation supporting a sister parish and school meals program outside of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, and said he was recently told his group could no longer be affiliated with the parish.
“I think they’re just going to close down the parish of Saint Augustine eventually. As part of that, you want to pull in the boundaries and allow that contraction to happen.”
Quaglione said the diocese had no plans to sell the church.
“Based on the parish growth and excitement, as mentioned previously, I would say that is nothing more than speculation,” he said.
‘Too Little, Too Late’
Ahead of the announcement Helping Hands Food Pantry would close, volunteers said they’d gone back and forth with Father Tumino for several weeks over a training protocol. Eventually they’d gotten the vast majority of their 30 volunteers to take the training and had begun to send a photo of their weekly sign-in sheet to church leadership, as they were newly required to do, after some reluctance from one leader.
“His church, his rules,” Wargo said, adding, “The other priests were never like this.”
Wargo said they’d been in compliance for four weeks when Tumino called in pantry volunteers to tell them their operation was no longer welcome in the church.
“‘Too little, too late.’ That was his response,” Wargo recalled.
Quaglione, the spokesperson for the diocese, denied that the volunteers had fulfilled the church requirements.
“Sadly reaching compliance was never achieved, with some key leaders encouraging volunteers not to comply. The program’s failure to create a safe environment for those serving, and being served, could not be ignored,” he said, pointing to several other food pantries within several blocks of Saint Augustine.
On the Helping Hands Food Pantry’s second-to-last Saturday, families collecting bags of supplies trickled in and out.
“I look forward [to] the food,” said Brenda Samuel, 66, leaving the hall laden with fresh vegetables and dry goods for herself, her two children and a neighbor. “That is so sad for them to close it for no reason. I don’t understand why they’re closing down.”
Carnela Dimanche, who’d worshiped at Saint Augustine for around 50 years, since she was 14, said it was the final straw for her. While many of her Haitian Creole-speaking friends had relocated to other churches years ago, she’d remained because of her connection to community through volunteering at the food pantry. After reading Tumino’s letter on the pantry closure, she said, she’d attended another church for the first time: “After this, I don’t have no choice but to leave.”