Priest doing good deeds across U.S.
LOS ANGELES Rev. Jim Sichko has a 50-state congregation and a simple mandate from the Pope: Go forth and do good deeds.
That’s why the Roman Catholic priest found himself standing by the drive-thru of a popular Hollywood fast-food joint on a recent afternoon buying lunch for everyone who stopped by. The next day he’d be at a gas station in Kentucky, topping off people’s tanks.
At a Starbucks last Christmas, he tipped each of the baristas US$100 after learning the annual brouhaha over whether the coffee chain’s holiday cups are Christmassy enough had caused tips to plummet.
Sichko is a papal missionary of mercy, a rarefied group of 700 from around the world, including 100 from the United States, who were appointed directly by Pope Francis in celebration of a Jubilee of Mercy that began in December 2015 and has been extended indefinitely.
Missionaries were assigned to travel the world spreading kindness, forgiveness, joy and mercy Some responded by using their newly granted authority from the Pope to perform confession and forgiveness of sins anywhere at any time. Others took to radio airwaves or retreats to offer messages of joy.
Sichko, a Kentucky-based preacher, came up with an idea different from the others and got his bishop at the Diocese of Lexington to sign off on it: He’d travel his country performing random acts of kindness in all 50 states.
He’s provided groceries for half a year to a man with HIV and paid for medical services for a struggling Muslim family. This Christmas, he’s headed to an elementary school in Corbin, Ky., where more than a quarter of the population lives in poverty. There he’ll surprise the school’s 100 second-graders with shiny new bicycles.
“The first question people ask is, ‘Why are you doing this?’ My question is why not?” Sicko, 51, said.
“My approach is not so much speaking about the word of God, although I do a lot of that, but showing the presence of God through acts of kindness that kind of shock the individual and kind of cause them to, maybe cause them to stop for a little bit. Or maybe, which I hope, to again bring kindness to others.”
To say he shocked his lunchtime crowd — at a busy Los Angeles fast-food restaurant where he’d just bought lunch for everybody — would be a bit of an understatement. One woman, overlooking his white clerical collar, asked Sichko if he was a politician.
“No, I’m not a politician. I’m a priest,” the balding, bespectacled Sichko replied.
“How did this happen?” a stunned Hardy Patel asked.
“Just decided. I’m in a good mood.”
“Early Christmas?”
“You got it. Pay it forward.” “I will do, I will do,” Patel told him before driving off with his cheeseburger, then circling back to thank Sichko personally and take a selfie with him.
“Here’s my selfie with the Pope,” Sichko told Luis Tostado a few minutes earlier as they posed for one by Tostado’s Chevy Silverado.
Sichko’s selfie shows him standing next to Francis as the pontiff cradles a bottle of 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle Kentucky bourbon the priest gave him during a visit to the Vatican.
Sichko says he still doesn’t know why the pontiff, who had never met him until 2015, chose him as a papal missionary of mercy. Ordained 20 years ago — “I always wanted to become a priest, ever since I was a little kid” — he was the pastor at St. Mark Catholic Church in Richmond, Ky., when he got the call.
Now he spends five days a week on the road paying for burgers and bicycles and handing out hundred-dollar bills, like the one he slipped 17-year-old Nicholas Vadi when he learned the teenager and his mom were celebrating Vadi’s birthday at the fast-food restaurant.
“I raise my own salary, living expense, insurance, everything,” Sichko says, adding he sends out “appeal letters” twice a year to parishioners and raises the rest from paid inspirational speaking engagements. “And then I give it away.”