Others greeted him warmly: "Hi Father! Nice to see you out here."
Some were more skeptical. When one of the St. Paul team handed out a rosary, the recipient asked, "Does it come with a lecture?"
"There was one guy who said, 'What are you bringing this here for?'" Father recalled.
"And I said, 'We're here to tell you God loves you.' And he said, 'I already know that.' So I said, 'Well good! You're one of the few'."
Others tried to avoid him by pulling out their phones and pretending to be busy.
"But even in that, if they were purposely ignoring us then we made an impression, because they knew we were out there," he said.
There were also some people who got blessings on Saturday that came back for another on Sunday.
"There were some people getting out of their Uber and they said, 'Hey he's still here! Father, can we get a blessing?'"
"I even heard a couple confessions," he said, though the confessees were people he already knew.
And although he advertised "answers" on his sign, there was one thing people asked that Father didn't know: "Where is the parking lot?"
"I said I promised I'd try, but I do not know where the parking is," Father said, laughing.
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His youth minister, Dominic Figueroa, snapped a photo of Father hanging out under his street lamp with his sign, and Father posted it on Facebook. Yesterday, friends started to realize that the post was trending on Reddit. It now has more than 640 votes and nearly 100 comments.
It's an evangelization experience that he and his St. Paul team are looking to do again. They already have an event scoped out this weekend.
"I think we made a little splash," Father said. "In a sense, this kind of started something for us."
The biggest takeaway, he said, was "how easy it was."
"I think too often we get tied up in planning, planning, planning. But when the Spirit moves, go with Him! No excuses."
Mary Farrow worked as a staff writer for Catholic News Agency until 2020. She has a degree in journalism and English education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.