Years ago, the Rev. Richard B. Martin, who died May 3 at 74, was searching for a way to make the Lenten season more meaningful for his parishioners in Northern Virginia. Instead of calling on them to give up the simple indulgences often sacrificed during the 40 days of reflection before Easter — chocolate or television shows — he asked for their spare change.

Father Martin settled on 50 cents a day, the amount someone might have spent at that time, in 1998, on a soda or pizza topping. The 2,500 families he served as pastor of Burke’s Catholic Church of the Nativity raised $67,000 by Easter.

Father Martin had developed ties with the Florida-based humanitarian organization Food for the Poor, which sent the money to the needy in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the developing world. In that first year after the Lenten collection, Food for the Poor built 27 houses.

Father Martin impressed on his parishioners the ongoing need in Haiti and strengthened the bond between his church and Food for the Poor’s outreach efforts there. By the time of his death, he had raised $4 million for housing and access to health care, education and clean water.

To date, the Church of the Nativity has helped finance homes for 1,300 families in eight “Nativity Villages.” The villages are developments that include community centers used for vocational training or as clinics or places of worship.


Father Martin had traveled throughout the Caribbean and Latin America during his decades as a priest and spoke in simple but harrowing ways about Cité Soleil, a slum near Port-au-Prince.


Hundreds of thousands of people there were terrorized by gangs, disease and chaos, he told his congregants. Roofs were made of cardboard, and families lacked electricity and running water.

“They use the creek to urinate and bathe in,” he said, according to a Washington Post account at the time, describing the living conditions he had witnessed.

“It got us all thinking,” parishioner Richard Miserendino told The Post in 1998. “We kept wondering what kind of house you could possibly buy for $2,500, but the fact that people [in Haiti] don’t even have that much really had an impact on our kids. . . . It’s easy to take things for granted, particularly when you live in Fairfax.”

Father Martin dubbed the effort Operation Starfish, a reference to one of his favorite parables.

In the story, a storm has thrown millions of starfish onto a beach. An old man is determined to save the delicate creatures and pitches them, one at a time, back into the sea.

“How can your effort make any difference?” asks a boy who has been watching.


The man tosses another starfish into the water and replies, “It made a difference to that one.”

Officials at Food for the Poor, which trademarked the Starfish name, said Father Martin’s work in Haiti spurred similar programs at more than 300 churches, schools and organizations across the United States.

“Many churches have done it over Easter, but none with the level of success that he inspired in his people,” said Angel Aloma, executive director of Food for the Poor.

“He wasn’t satisfied with just building the stuff,” Aloma added. “He’d go back the next year and help the people by doing another project. If the village needed clean water, he’d help dig a well so the village would not have to send its little girls walking three hours away to find water.”


In all, Aloma said, Father Martin’s efforts benefited many thousands of Haitians.

“They no longer live on dirt floors and no longer get wet when it rains and have to sleep in the mud,” he said. “They have a home, with a door that locks with a key, so parents find it safer to leave their kids with Granny. They leave their home, with its few possessions, to go out and find work.”

Aloma added that Father Martin funded efforts to teach sewing and animal husbandry, among other skills, that would help Haitians “not only come out of poverty, but have the dignity to support themselves, to move them up in the ladder of life. That is a huge thing.”

Richard Bernard Martin was born Oct. 17, 1939, in Providence, R.I., and grew up in Warwick, R.I. He was a 1962 graduate of Providence College and attended St. Francis Seminary in Loretto, Pa., before his ordination in 1966 at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond.

He worked at churches across Northern Virginia before joining Church of the Nativity in 1997. From 1977 to 1981, he was an Air Force chaplain.

Father Martin, a Burke resident, died at a hospital in Fairfax County of complications from diabetes, said Jim McDaniel, the Operation Starfish coordinator at Church of the Nativity. Survivors include a brother and a sister.

In addition to his work in Haiti, Father Martin helped the poor and the marginalized in the Washington area through Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement. His efforts were aimed at promoting affordable housing and work opportunities for immigrants.


The parish motto, Father Martin once wrote in the Church of the Nativity bulletin, was, “We reach out to those in need, across the street and around the world.”

Why Religion Matters: The Twinned Life of Family and Faith

This essay on family and faith is the third in a five-part series about the value of religion

SALT LAKE CITY — “Congregations erect a sacred canopy of meaning over the great chapters of family life: birth, childrearing, and marriage.” — W. Bradford Wilcox[1]

For all its progress and possibilities, our modern world has difficulty seeing beyond itself. Every age has to struggle against its blind spots. In ancient Rome, for example, the span of a person’s influence was reckoned at 100 years. Within that horizon individuals could remember two generations back and care for two generations forward. Then, as the custom went, that influence stopped, and a new century, with new people and new concerns, would reset itself.[2] But lasting societies need a broader vision.



The pull of the present is strong, but so are the tugs to the past and the future. Family and faith — our two great bridges beyond the here and now — stretch far past 100 years, in both directions, and expand the purpose and meaning of our lives.

None of us is born a mere individual. We come to this world with a network of pre-existing ties, bonds and obligations. These family relationships shape our worldviews, instil our values and form our identities. And families of all kinds thrive when they join a community of believers. The benefits go both ways — churches strengthen families, and families strengthen churches. Working together, family and faith reinforce norms of right and wrong, teach us how to love our neighbors and provide a support base where children and parents navigate life’s challenges. In other words, family and faith keep us from being alone. They enlarge our circles of responsibility beyond the self and help us turn strangers into friends. Families then pass this spiritual and social capital across generations.

Marshaling extensive social science research, author Mary Eberstadt shows how closely these forces are intertwined. “Family and faith are the invisible double helix of society,” she writes, “two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.”[3]

This partnership can be seen at church on Sunday afternoons. Eberstadt points to broad sociological agreement that participation in the family rituals of “being married and having children is linked to higher levels of churchgoing and other types of religious practice.”[4] Another factor is the effect children have on the religious lives of their parents. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox puts it simply: “Children drive parents to church.”[5] It’s a common story — kids grow up in a church, leave home for college and drift from the faith, only to return when they get married and have children. What explains this phenomenon? The decisions we make about our deepest beliefs and closest relationships are never simple. But Wilcox adds an important insight: “The arrival of a child can awaken untapped reserves of love, recognition of the transcendent, and concern for the good life.”[6] These things matter because family and religion are among the most basic human institutions. When together, they connect society; when apart, society weakens.

The sacred relationships between kin and church, church and kin, tie us to the past, present and future. Such continuity helps us situate ourselves in this big universe. We find out who we are. The poet Wendell Berry gives expression to these aspirations: “The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds.”[7]

The fortunes of family and faith will continue to ebb and flow, as they have in various periods throughout history, but experience shows they will do so joining hands. As the one rises or falls, so will the other. The course of history is not predetermined; it is chosen. And those choices have long trajectories — much too long, indeed, to fit in 100 years.

 [1] W. Bradford Wilcox, “As the Family Goes,” First Things, May 2007.


[2] See Remi Brague, “The Impossibility of Secular Society,” First Things, Oct. 2013.


[3] Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, 2013, 22.


[4] Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, 93.


[5] Wilcox, “As the Family Goes.”


[6] Wilcox, “As the Family Goes.”


[7] Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992.