Catholic priest gets a kidney donation … and more

In the United States, the National Kidney Registry reports that more than 90,000 people are currently waiting for a life-saving organ donation.

Statistics like that could be vague concepts -- until the issue hits home.

St. Mary Mother of God Catholic Church in Jackson, Georgia, is one of those “homes” that recently got “hit” with the issue. 

Jackson is in a rural area southeast of Atlanta. Jackson Lake attracts boaters, campers, fishing enthusiasts, and folks looking for some summertime relaxation. It has also attracted retirees from various parts of the country, adding to the development that is eating up the dairy farms and hay fields that grace the sides of state highways.

Baptist and other Protestant churches abound in the area, but the Catholic population has been on a steady upswing for years, aided by retiree and other resettlement, as well as immigration from Latin America. 

St. Mary’s has had an older population in the past, but a lot of younger faces are showing up on Sundays, boosting an 11% rise that a sacristan has reported in recent years. The parish now has about 350 families. Catechism classes for youngsters are “at capacity,” said Lisa Berg, director of religious education.

For the past 10 years, the parish has been guided by a soft-spoken India-born priest, Fr. Jose Kochuparampil. Perhaps because many parishioners will find his surname a challenge, he is generally referred to as Father Jose -- not pronounced as the Spanish José, but something like “Joe’s.” 

In recent years, Fr. Jose developed a condition that has led to a loss of kidney function. A doctor told him that the cysts insistently developing within his kidneys necessitated him being on dialysis or getting a kidney transplant. He was fitted with a port so he could be on at-home dialysis, a status that lasted for two and a half years and proved somewhat limiting.

Eventually, he registered as a transplant candidate, and his hospital, Piedmont Atlanta, created a microsite for him, which would create awareness of his need. The daughter of a couple in the parish, who works in local media, designed a flier and posted it on social media.

In the end, 26 people -- some from the parish, but many from other parishes in the Archdiocese of Atlanta and people from all over the country -- registered on the microsite as potential donors. 

On November 12, 2025, Fr. Jose received a call from the hospital: “Congratulations. We have found a match for you.”

“I didn’t expect that call and didn’t know what to say, but I asked the hospital if they could tell me who is the donor,” Fr. Jose told Aleteia. “They told me it was confidential but could confirm that it was someone who had registered on the microsite.”

Surgery was scheduled for December 5. Fr. Jose announced to parishioners that he would be out for some time recuperating, but that arrangements would be made for substitute priests to come from other parts of the archdiocese. 

For many parishioners, the news was a big relief. They knew that their pastor was in need of a kidney, but there seemed to be nothing forthcoming. 

“People were worried. A lot of people were asking who might be getting a blood test,” said Dennis Ordyna, a parish sacristan. “Getting into the second year of dialysis, it made it tough on him. I think it put some doubts in his mind too, whether he’d ever find a donor.”

Fr. Jose said that some parishioners had stepped forward to be tested, but they turned out to be non-compatible. 

On Thursday, November 20, eight days after Fr. Jose got the good news from the hospital, the weekday Mass was rescheduled from Noon to the evening. A young family -- father, mother, and two daughters -- asked to see Fr. Jose after Mass. It was near Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent.

“After Mass, they came into the sacristy and gave me this card,” the pastor said, as he showed it to a visiting reporter. The card read:

“When I read it, I was frozen,” Fr. Jose recalled. “I did not know what to say. I was just looking at them. And after some time I said ‘Thank you’ and hugged Noah.”

It was the flier that the parishioners’ daughter created that caught the attention of Rachael Zell. She and her husband, Noah Zell, and two young daughters had been welcomed into the parish just the year before. After learning of their pastor’s need, Rachael approached her husband with the idea of donating a kidney.

Born in nearby Newnan, Georgia, Noah was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant, but since his parents divorced when he was four he was reared as a Protestant. 

“As I got older, I kind of drifted from my faith,” said Noah, 38, who works in information technology. “Then I met Rachael. Both of us had similar experiences, drifting away, living in the world.”

They started to “reconnect” with the Faith when their first daughter was born. “My wife really pushed to find a church home when we moved to Jackson,” he told Aleteia. “At first, we went to Jackson First Baptist. As we tried to grow and mature our faith life, we asked questions and didn’t get the kind of answers we were expecting. I started to look into the history of the Catholic Church. I guess it’s easy to recognize the truth when you find out how blind you’ve been.”

The couple reached out to St. Mary’s and signed up for the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA). 

“I think it was during OCIA that my wife saw a post on Facebook about Fr. Jose’s minisite,” Noah said. “I said, ‘I think I’m just going to fill out the form. I felt kind of led to just start there. As each step progressed, I was like, ‘Well, let's see how this next step goes.’ And I got to the point that I told Rachael, ‘Well, I’m just going to keep going through each next step, and if this is God’s will that this happens, then I’ll do it.’”

He admits to having had initial concerns about the risks of such a radical surgery and the prospect of living the rest of his life with just one kidney. But he said he “tried my best to resign myself to God's will.” 

As Noah took successive medical tests to find out if there was compatibility according to blood, tissue, organ tissue and genetics, and those tests proved successful, his “worry about those things became less and less and less.”

“The evaluation process is very thorough,” he testified. In addition to minimizing the chance that the recipient’s body will reject the donated organ, the organ transplant team tries to “make sure your quality of life won’t be drastically impacted by the donation.”

At Easter 2025, Fr. Jose administered the Sacrament of Confirmation to Noah and Rachael and gave their 13-year-old, the older daughter, her first Communion.

Meanwhile, Noah kept going for evaluations, never mentioning it to Fr. Jose or anyone else. Finally, he got a call saying he was a match. 

“I felt a real peace about it because I came to terms that if this is going to happen, well, I’m in good hands. I just said ‘Yes.’ I tried not to think about it too much, just took it one step at a time.”

A big consideration in Noah’s discernment was giving a good example to his children. “I figured it was a good way to show them how to live out our faith,” he said. “I didn't feel I could tell my daughters that [living the Faith] is what we should do if I don’t do it.”

For the parish, too, it’s been a time of formation, to learn something about organ donation, and to have a real-life example of Christian sacrifice. 

“Definitely, Noah’s act was an inspiration for the entire community,” said Fr. Jose. “Everybody thanks Noah and his family for the incredible courage and generosity with which they came forward, for his determination to live his life for others.”

There were other gifts that came from the experience as well. One parishioner who stepped forward to be tested turned out not to be a match, but because of the testing, his doctors were able to alert him to a serious medical condition and get it resolved before it progressed to a critical stage.

For the Zell family, another consideration in their discernment was the fact that Fr. Jose is their pastor. 

“One of the things we discussed was that since Fr. Jose made a decision to be a priest, he gave up any possibility to have a family and children, and I thought, ‘Well maybe if this goes well and we’re a match, he's more a part of our family.’”

It was Rachael who wanted to let Fr. Jose know who the donor was. According to Noah, she felt that “it might not be fair to not let him have the joy of knowing where the donation came from -- even more so with us being at the same parish.”

“I did not know Noah and his family well,” Fr. Jose said. “They just joined the parish last year. They’re very devout people. They’re very serious about their faith life.”

For both the donor and the recipient, prayer was of utmost importance throughout the whole experience -- and continues to be. Fr. Jose said that as he was being prepped for surgery, he was praying for his donor.

“I can assure you of the power of prayer, that the Lord was curing me and the Blessed Mother was keeping me under her mantle, because I never felt any pain,” said the 66-year-old priest. “So many people were praying for me, in the parish, in the archdiocese, in parishes where I have served, in other parts of the nation, people back home in India.”

So far, he said, he has had no complications and is back serving at the parish.

What advice would Noah give to anyone thinking about becoming a donor? “Try to be open and say ‘Yes’ more.”

And as for any fear one might have, he said, “People die in car accidents every day, and workplace accidents, health complications. You could drop dead of a heart attack, for no apparent reason. It would be sad if we all lived in the shadow of fear of what might happen.”

Fr. Jose’s advice to people facing the kind of situation he faced: “Place it at the feet of Jesus and say ‘Lord, let thy will be done.’ And then it does not become a burden for us.”

For people considering organ donation, he likes to remind people that Christ said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

“Offering a part of the body is in tune with the message of Jesus,” he said.