By Christina Gray
By the time Father Raymund Reyes, the longtime pastor of St. Augustine Parish made an appeal to his South San Francisco parish community last fall, he’d been living more or less privately with chronic kidney disease (CKD) for over five years. Parishioners and fellow priests had taken notice of their beloved pastor’s weight loss and wan complexion. Only a few knew about the crippling fatigue, shortness of breath, edema, and infections he endured while fulfilling his pastoral duties.
“Would you consider being a donor for me?” the 62-year-old priest asked his parish in a Sept. 25, 2025, letter which detailed his dire situation.
Diagnosed with stage three CKD (of 5 stages) in 2019, Father Reyes was nearing end-stage renal failure. His kidneys were no longer filtering waste effectively from his blood or removing excess water from his body. Two different forms of dialysis, a process that mechanically filters the blood for patients with impaired kidney function, had resulted in several life-threatening infections. That summer Father Reyes learned there was only one treatment left.
“My doctors want me to consider getting a kidney transplant, which will give me my best chance of living a longer life to serve the people entrusted to me,” he wrote.
Literally, a friend for life
Of the more than 40 individuals within and beyond the parish who responded to Father Reyes’ quest for a kidney donor, no one was a better match than Father Francis Garbo, pastor of Mission Dolores Basilica/Misión San Francisco de Asís.
Father Reyes and Father Garbo arrived in San Francisco separately from the Philippines, one after the other in the late 1990s, and ministered to the Filipino-Catholic community here. Over the ensuing decades and through their respective pastoral assignments, they became friends. The pair joined together in Mass and meals with other Filipino priests on their days off, shared golf games, birthdays, basketball scrimmages, and memories of their shared homeland. Today, they shepherd large, vibrant parishes only a dozen miles apart.
Within the tight-knit Filipino-Catholic community dear to both priests, Father Reyes’ need for a kidney transplant became common knowledge in the last half of 2025. While many in the parish and larger local Catholic community stepped forward willing to be a donor (including family members and four other priests) none had proved to be a viable match.
Father Garbo explored the living donor application process online, but made no mention of it to Father Reyes when his friend asked him directly, “What about you? Have you signed up yet?” His questions were asked somewhat in jest, but what Father Garbo heard was not a joke as much as a plea.
Unwilling to let Father Reyes hang his hopes on a kidney he didn’t know he’d be eligible to give, Father Garbo discreetly completed a rigorous and extended battery of qualifying tests and interviews between his pastoral duties.
Prior to Christmas, he learned that he was an optimal match. Not only did he share Father Reyes’ blood type and have no medical conditions that would eliminate him as a donor, but his kidney function was better than what is considered “normal.”
For Father Garbo, it was the kind of sign he had been looking for as he prayed for guidance: “Lord, if it is your will that I help Father Ray with the gift you have given me, my kidney, it is yours and I am willing.”
He hurried to the St. Augustine parish rectory to deliver the news in person. A stunned Father Reyes asked him why he did it. He knew well the demands of a being a pastor of a large parish. “Because you asked me,” Father Garbo said simply.
A surgical date was scheduled at Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center, a transplant leader that performs over 200 kidney transplants per year. Jan. 20 was the day one priest would give, and another priest would get the gift of life.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone rejoiced at the news and sent a letter to the priests of the archdiocese asking for their prayers for both priests and commending Father Garbo for his sacrifice.
On the night before the surgeries, Father Vito Perrone, pastor of Mater Dolorosa Parish, anointed both priests and heard their confessions. On the morning of the transplant, Father Reyes and Father Garbo were wheeled into separate surgical arenas, the prayers of the local Catholic community going with them. One day later, tests showed that Father Reyes’ kidney function was already returning to normal levels.
A pastor’s blessings and burdens
Father Reyes was born in the Province of Pampanga on the outskirts of Manila. Ordained in 1988, he served as a parish priest at three different parishes in the Archdiocese of San Fernando before moving to the U.S. at the request of his archbishop to serve at St. Patrick Parish in San Francisco. Many from his home province worshipped there. His short-term assignment as parochial vicar at St. Patrick led to long-term pastoral roles at St. Isabella Parish in San Rafael and St. Anne of the Sunset Parish in San Francisco. In 2014, he was appointed vicar for clergy, and in 2019 — the same year as his diagnosis, he was concurrently installed as pastor of St. Augustine Church. Father Reyes was incardinated in 2005.
“Father Ray carried a heavy cross quietly,” St. Augustine parishioner and parish council vice chair Vivian Raval Ramos told Catholic San Francisco. Ramos became one member of an integral care team for Father Reyes that almost mystically materialized at the point his kidney disease reached its most critical stage. It included Ramos, her husband Glenn, a medical doctor from the Philippines, his sister Rochie Ramos Guintu, a nephrology nurse with decades of experience in dialysis care, Christmas Tiletile, a member of the choir and the Live Kidney Transplant Coordinator for California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, and parishioners Joriz and Susan Madrid.
“Few knew that behind his steady presence at Mass and his thoughtful homilies were repeat hospitalizations, dialysis treatments, infections, and profound physical suffering,” said Ramos. Even while very ill, he continued writing his weekly pastoral message on Flocknote, celebrated parish feasts and novenas complete with large meals afterwards. “Had Father Ray not sought help to find a kidney donor, only we (his care team) would have known the extent of what he endured.”
He lived with the “full burden” of uremia, she said, a clinical description of the buildup of waste products and toxins in the blood, the result of kidney failure. Untreated, it causes severe physical and mental symptoms and certain death.
Kidney disease and donation
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in seven adults, or about 35.5 million people (or 14% of the population) are estimated to have chronic kidney disease. As many as 9 in 10 adults with CKD do not know they have it. Primary risk factors include diabetes and high blood pressure. Others include heart disease, obesity, family history, inherited disorders, past kidney damage, and aging. CKD is more common in Black, Asian and Hispanic adults than White adults.
From outside appearances, Father Reyes appeared to be the picture of health. He had been a familiar sight jogging through his parish neighborhoods. After his initial diagnosis at Stanford Medical Center, a biopsy determined his kidney failure was caused by “IgA Nephropathy,” also known as Berger disease. It’s a disease more prevalent in Asians. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, as with so many with kidney disease, also contributed, said Father Reyes.
Sadly, only three days after Father Reyes received his new kidney, his brother, “Ronnie” Macaplinlac Reyes, died of complications related to the treatment of his own kidney disease in the Philippines.
Father Reyes’s care was managed by Sutter Health’s Kidney Program at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in concert with his care team. Initial treatments were unsuccessful in halting the progression of his disease.
Father Reyes signed up for the donor program at the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), that had a kidney waitlist of nearly 90,000 people. He had also signed up at Stanford and had added his name to the list at Sutter Health.
He explained the race for time in his September letter: “I could wait for a kidney from a donor who has died in California, but the wait is about 6-8 years — time that I obviously don’t have.”
A “conversion” within a crisis
Father Reyes said that he kept his diagnosis to himself for as long as he did because he believed he could and should handle it on his own. “I didn’t want to talk about my struggles in public,” he said. Nor did he want to add to the burden of the very people who looked to him for pastoral care and guidance.
But his health crisis also gave him the opportunity to become a better priest by sharing his vulnerabilities and needs.
“It converted me,” said Father Reyes, who will ease back into his pastoral duties slowly after a period of isolation, monitoring and recovery. “I owed it to my parishioners to let them know what was going on in my life,” he said. “They ask me to pray for them, why can’t I ask them to pray for me?”
He described the effect of his willingness to “talk more openly about my struggles.” It directly informed his homilies, he said. “I got countless notes thanking me for being an example for them with their health challenges.”
Father Reyes wrote his appeal letter for a kidney donor and posted it to his Facebook account and in the church bulletin that was then shared throughout the Archdiocese of San Francisco. With the blessing of the archbishop, Father Reyes was seeking a kidney donor beyond the three transplant pools to which he was registered.
A donor’s discernment
Father Garbo and Father Reyes didn’t know each other when they first met at St. Patrick Parish in San Francisco. Msgr. Fred Bitanga was at that time the first of three Filipino pastors there, and according to Father Garbo, “like a godfather to us.”
St. Patrick Parish was like an “Ellis Island for Filipino priests” as they came to San Francisco, according to Father Garbo, who was ordained in the Archdiocese of Manila in 1990.
Father Garbo had recently concluded his appointment as the first Superior General of the Marian Missionaries of the Holy Cross when he arrived in the U.S. in 1998. His visit to Msgr. Bitanga and to local relatives led to an assignment in 1998 as parochial vicar of St. Andrew Parish in Daly City, still a primarily Filipino parish. He was incardinated in 2005. After serving pastoral terms at Our Lady of Loretto in Novato, St. Charles Parish in San Carlos, and St. Timothy Parish in San Mateo, Father Garbo was named pastor of Mission Dolores Basilica/Misión San Francisco de Asís in 2015.
After learning that the dozens of people willing to donate a kidney to Father Reyes had not produced a match, Father Garbo took the matter up with God.
“Lord, I am turning 65 years old this May,” he said. “What more can I give?”
After he was confirmed as an eligible donor, however, Father Garbo wrestled with more human impulses. Misión San Francisco de Asís is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year with many special events. He had pilgrimages planned, a special quinceanera, and all the regularly scheduled liturgies and activities of a large parish and tourist destination.
“I was ready, let’s do it now,” he said smiling at the memory. “I wanted to give, but also wanted it to take place immediately and according to my plan and schedules.”
Father Garbo likened being a donor to being an expectant mother carrying another life.
“You begin to be very careful about what you eat and everything you do,” he said.
He was impressed with the spiritual and mental preparation he received as an organ donor. “They will tell you the ups and downs to expect,” he said. “It’s a very holistic process.”
As for the surgery itself, his kidney was removed laparoscopically four inches below the belly button. His surgeon showed him his own kidney, a precious, life-sustaining organ about the size of a clenched first.
Service and witness
While Father Reyes received a new kidney, he also learned to see his priesthood through new eyes.
During one of his many hospitalizations, he questioned why God “would let me go through this” when he needed to be well enough to fulfill his ministry. A priest friend reminded him that a priest’s life span includes both service and witness.
Priests are called first to ‘diaconia,’ the Greek word for service, his friend said. But the time will come when serving is difficult or impossible because of old age or illness. The next stage of ministry is ‘marturia,’ he said, rooted in the Greek word for witness. “There will be a time in our lives where we can just be a recipient of the love of God and the people he sends,” he said.
Christina Gray is the lead writer for Catholic San Francisco.
