By Christina Gray
Father Lawrence Goode was a fifth grader at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in Redwood City when one of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur asked students what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“I had never really thought about it before,” said the longtime pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in East Palo Alto, now ostensibly retired at age 86. “I was happy being a kid.”
If he had to grow up, his first choice was to be a baseball player. His second choice, he reasoned, had to be something “really good” though, “the very best thing you can be.” He wrote out the word “priest.”
“As I look back, I think I made the right choice,” Father Goode told Catholic San Francisco in the St. Anthony rectory in Novato where he is currently living in active retirement.
“If you want to do something really, really good in life, become a priest,” he said.
After concluding his 20-year assignment earlier this year as pastor at St. Francis of Assisi, Father Goode (pronounced Good-y) was provided residence at St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Menlo Park to help out while he waited for a room to open up at Serra Clergy House, a retirement community for priests in San Mateo. Only a few months later he found himself “packing up my box” again for St. Anthony of Padua but this time for the parish in Marin County. He celebrates daily Mass, hears confessions, leads the rosary, works with local charities and is even helping the parish establish its first Legion of Mary chapter.
“I didn’t see myself fitting the mold”
Lawrence Goode grew up in Redwood City in the same house in which his mom was born and raised. He and his brother sat in the same classrooms at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School that she once had. They both dutifully served as altar boys at Sunday Mass.
Though he admired the priests he knew, he shared his father’s view of priests as being “exalted, up on a pedestal, separate from the people.”
“I didn’t see myself fitting into the mold,” he said. The idea of “people looking up to me” made him deeply uncomfortable.
Despite doubts along the way about his perception of “what it means to be a priest,” Father Goode said he didn’t overthink it.
“I just got on the path and just kept going,” he said. Father Goode was ordained in 1964 for Archdiocese of San Francisco (The Diocese of San Jose was created in 1981.)
Peacekeeper and protector
Father Goode’s pastoral cloth was cut by his experience at St. Mary’s Parish in Gilroy, his first assignment as a new priest. It was here that he developed a devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“The people there were very, very Catholic,” he said of the mostly Spanish-speaking parish. “They encouraged me in my faith.”
Along with the duties of associate pastor, he found himself helping his parishioners – the majority of whom were poor, immigrant farm-working families – in practical matters. He advocated and bargained for their rights and fair treatment from farm owners and landlords. He became bilingual along the way.
“In my first four years as a priest, I saw firsthand the way these people were treated, the housing they lived in,” he said. “So, it was natural for me to do as a priest.”
He was present at the picket lines with other priests to prevent altercations between the farmworkers, the landowners and the community.
“I was there to keep the peace,” said Father Goode.
“Taking back the streets”
Father Goode was eventually assigned to St. Catherine Parish in suburban Burlingame. He subsequently served in a variety of pastoral positions at St. Matthias Parish in Redwood City, All Souls Parish in South San Francisco and Star of the Sea Parish in San Francisco. In 2003, he was assigned to St. Francis of Assisi Parish in East Palo Alto. The city flanking affluent Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto had a reputation at that time as the “murder capital of the U.S.” It followed a period when the city had the highest reported per-capita murder rate in the nation.
“I remember a single day when I had to lead not one but two funerals – one for a 13-year-old and the other for a 17-year-old,” he said. Father Goode was determined to “take the streets back” by bringing the faith community out of hiding. He partnered with the African American pastors of other local churches to help turn down the fire on simmering feuds between Black and Latino residents. Street prayer vigils were held as well as other visible, church-related events such as the Christmastime “Las Posadas” a traditional Mexican reenactment of the Nativity story, and Stations of the Cross during Lent.
“The streets belonged to the gangs at that time, so we were sending a message to them that we also had ownership of these streets,” he said.
Father Goode swapped money for weapons, collecting rifles, machetes, pistols and brass knuckles that he turned over to the local police.
A community organizer by nature, Father Goode also encouraged the local faith community to have a voice in the improvement of the city. He gathered church leaders of all stripes under one roof for Fellowship of Faith meetings to discuss ideas that were presented monthly to city officials.
“My goal was that our people would be at the table where the decisions were being made,” said Father Goode.
Legion of Mary
Concurrently with nearly all of his more than 60 years of pastoral work, Father Goode served as the spiritual director and chaplain of the local chapter of the Legion of Mary, the largest lay apostolate of the Catholic Church. In a written documentary for the Legion of Mary’s 100th anniversary in 2024, Father Goode described how prayer once disarmed a man on the local streets.
“We had just finished saying the Legion prayers on the corner of Jones and Eddy,” he said. “This man was on his way to shoot someone when Our Lady touched his heart. I ended up with a pocketful of bullets.”
As far as his spot at Serra Clergy House is concerned, Father Goode is emphatically not in a hurry.
“I’m not at all interested in traveling and those kinds of things,” he said. “I like what I’m doing and it fulfills me, work that nobody else can or wants to do.”
Christina Gray is the lead writer for Catholic San Francisco.
