Two freezers, a refrigerator and an estimated 5 tons of food were cleared out Tuesday from the former St. William school building on Harlem Road — ending a more than 30-year run for the West Seneca pantry.

Pantry volunteers and some parishioners call the shutdown the latest fallout from a merger of two Catholic parishes.

The Rev. Dennis Wolf, pastor of Blessed John XXIII parish — formed last year through the merger of St. William and St. Bonaventure— says the pantry had to be moved because of a pending space crunch.

The parish, which worships in the former St. William Church, has received an offer from an Anglican congregation that wants to use the former St. Bonaventure Church for worship. Another group has offered to buy the former St. Bonaventure school building, Wolf said,

“We’re going to have to move everything from the Bonaventure campus to the St. William campus,” he explained. “The food pantry was not a parish-owned ministry. We’re going to need all the space in that building.”

Religious education and bingo will have to relocate to the St. William school building, which needs to be made handicapped- accessible, Wolf said.

Volunteers, though, maintained that the pantry was an integral part of the parish, which, they said, has plenty of space to accommodate it and other programs.

The pantry distributed an average of 2,000 meals per month, but became the second ministry aiding the poor that the parish has eliminated since the merger.

It previously had dropped out of the Interfaith Hospitality Network, a cooperative of area congregations that takes turns housing homeless families.

“We have two empty buildings, and we’re losing two ministries to the poor so we can clean and paint,” said Mary Lou Dietrich, pantry director. “The way things are being handled, such as this, has caused people to leave the parish.”

Linda Harm, a longtime member of St. Bonaventure who served as a Eucharistic minister and pre-Cana counselor, said she will join another parish because of how the merger has unfolded.

“They’re walking all over people doing it. They’re not doing it with kindness. We used to have a say in decisions,” she said.

Dietrich said the pantry had been a parish-sponsored ministry since it began in 1978 at St. Bonaventure Church under Monsignor Richard C. Crumlish. It moved to St. William Church in the mid-1980s.

“Father Crumlish signed the papers at the Food Bank making this a function of the parish,” she said.

Wolf said plans to move the pantry were circulated months ago, but Dietrich said she was told just three weeks ago that the pantry needed to be out within a week. The Food Bank of Western New York was able to get the date pushed back to Tuesday.

Volunteers have been scrambling to find storage space for the food and a new location for the pantry.

A Protestant church in West Seneca has offered a house for the pantry, which Dietrich hopes to have up and running again in September.

The Food Bank of Western New York said clients of the pantry will be served at several other pantries in West Seneca, Cheektowaga, South Buffalo and Orchard Park until Dietrich gets a new site operating.