The former pastor of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Franciscan Father Thomas J. Giblin, died in New York Aug. 26 after an illness. He was 72.

The funeral Mass was celebrated Aug. 30 at the chapel of Siena College in Loudonville, New York, where Father Giblin had served. Burial was at St. Agnes Cemetery near the college.

A native of Albany, New York, Father Giblin celebrated his 50th anniversary as a friar while serving his second pastorate at the Shrine, Atlanta’s historic Catholic church near the Capitol. It was also during that pastorate, from 1980 to 1984, that the parish community was struck by tragedy and change. In August 1982 fire broke out in the Shrine at night and devastated Atlanta’s oldest building, leading the parish to a time of worship in the sanctuary of Central Presbyterian Church while the Shrine was rebuilt.

Earlier in 1982, a middle-of-the-night conversation between Father Giblin and Buck Griffin, a parishioner of the Shrine, while both were working as volunteers at the Central night shelter, led to the creation of the Shrine’s Saturday Soup kitchen, St. Francis Table. Brenda Griffin said it was Father Giblin’s recollection of a downtown bread line in New York during the Depression that led to the idea. Saturday was the one day a week when no kitchen in Atlanta was open for street people, and so the Shrine stepped in and filled the gap, with Father Giblin offering the name of the order’s patron for the simple effort being proposed.

Mrs. Griffin, who joined the Catholic Church at Immaculate Conception, said her pastor’s humility was such that it was some time after she joined that she learned who he was. “He never shouldered his way around,” she recalled. “I just said hello to him and one day it dawned on me that this was Father Tom.” Something similar was evoked even as she came to know him well and saw him with others. “I just loved that he would come down to St. Francis Table in his habit and stand around and eat a bowl of soup with the men.” A special gift he had, she said, was to see “each of us as we would like to see ourselves at one’s best… He strove to be fully present to those around him.”

Pastor in Atlanta from 1970 to 1973 and from 1980 to 1984, he retired in March 1984 to St. Stephen’s parish on the upper East Side of New York. He is survived by two brothers and a sister and many nieces and nephews.