Baton Rouge, La., Dec 18, 2018 / 04:16 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When Fr. Josh Johnson arrived as pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Catholic Church over a year ago, he slept in a room above the choir loft.
The church and rectory had been ravaged by a flood a couple years prior that had destroyed or damaged 95 percent of the small town of St. Amant, Louisiana. The pastor of Holy Rosary had also left due to health reasons, leaving the wrecked parish without a pastor.
Knowing he was coming into a difficult situation, Johnson called in the big guns: he asked communities of cloistered nuns to surround his new parish in prayer.
“I immediately reached out to the cloistered convents and was like: ‘Hey y’all, here’s the deal. I’m going to this parish that’s just been devastated, can y’all please adopt this parish as spiritual mothers and intercede for these people?’” Johnson told CNA.
Then he bumped up the amount of time that the sacraments would be available to his parishioners. He rearranged the schedule so that his staff could start their day with Mass and adoration.
Fast-forward to today – the prayers of those nuns, and of the people of the parish of Holy Rosary, have come to fruition in the booming and thriving Full of Grace Cafe, a one-stop-shop community center run out of the renovated rectory.
The full name of the rectory-turned-community-center is: Full of Grace Cafe: Quenching God’s Thirst for Charity & Justice.
And the name fits, because it’s hard to come up with a service that Full of Grace Cafe doesn’t offer.
It’s a coffee shop, but it’s also a food pantry and a soup kitchen and a diaper drive and a laundromat. There are volunteer Human Resources specialists, psychological counselors, a hair stylist, a Creighton FertilityCare specialist and an ultrasound machine. There’s a room for small groups and bible studies. There’s a fireplace and a pool table and a courtyard for outdoor movie nights and socials after Mass.
That wasn’t the original vision. At first, Johnson had the simple idea to move the existing food pantry to a more prominent location, and to maybe one day open a coffee shop.
“I had a very small vision at first, just put the food pantry up front, that way when people come to our campus, you see a beautiful church, and then you see a space for service of the poor,” he said.
“And then from that, different parishioners just began to share their dreams.” All of the services are offered pro bono by parishioners who wanted to share their gifts with the community, Johnson said.
“One lady came to me and said I have the gift of doing hair, and then she said my friends do too, and we would love to come and do hair for free there. And so I said ok, cool, it can be a food pantry and a salon.”
As word got out about the cafe, the offers of help just kept coming.
“And then someone said why don’t we make it a soup kitchen too? I love to cook. These people out here can cook well! So I was like ok, we can do that. Then another woman who works with me, she’s a Creighton fertility care specialist, and she was like, I can walk with couples and do Creighton FertilityCare for people who are infertile or who have endometriosis or cysts on their ovaries or who want to do Natural Family Planning.”
Johnson also recruited the help of local branches of Catholic Charities, St. Vincent de Paul, and other non-profits in the area to bolster the services and to provide legal help and counseling.
He said he hopes to bring Jesus to people in a way that is non-threatening, in a way that informs, but doesn’t force anything. He said he wants people to feel heard, and for them to know that the cafe is a place where people can come and mutually share their gifts and their lives.
“The goal is really to have a place where the body of Christ can come together to give and receive,” he said.
“I’m going there to receive too, I’m certainly going to give in there, but I’m also receiving. Like when I do a bible study with our parishioners, God speaks to me through their wisdom and through their love for the Lord. And whenever I’m with the poor I’m receiving as much as I’m giving, so its a place of mutuality, where I can give to you and I can receive your gift and we can accompany each other toward heaven.”
Johnson is not foreign to mission work. Before he became a priest, he spent time serving with Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, in Calcutta, India. He’s served the poor with a religious order in Jamaica, and several years ago he was on mission at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the cafe is just a means, Johnson said, not an end. The goal is to point people to Jesus, and ultimately, to make saints.
“On the wall for (Mother Teresa’s) home for the dying and the destitute, there’s a quote on the wall that Mother Teresa said to God,” Johnson said. “She said: I will give Holy Mother Church saints. And I remember when I saw that quote it pierced my heart, so it’s on my ordination card…and this is my way of drawing people to the sacraments.”
Johnson himself left the Church when he was young. What brought him back, he said, was the Eucharist.
“The Eucharist is what brought me back to Jesus and so I believe if I could just get people to come to our campus, then I have the opportunity to point them to Jesus and the Eucharist because the Eucharist is where transformation happens,” he said.
“The Eucharist is going to do everything else, I’ve seen Jesus work miracles, it’s so cool,” he said.
He’s invited Protestants to come to Eucharistic adoration at his parish, and “I’ve just seen legit transformations… people who don’t even know what’s going on have these hardcore transformations because Jesus is alive, and I think we just need to believe that Jesus is God and that he can do what he says he does.”
Johnson has endless stories of all kinds of providential encounters that have happened through the Full of Grace Cafe. There was Micky, a homeless man who wanted community and is now connected to a bible study. There was a distressed young man in the parking lot who needed a job – and was able to take a roofing job that another man had told Johnson about the day before.
Something else Johnson wanted to emphasize was the evangelizing aspect of the Full of Grace Cafe. He didn’t just want to offer food or laundry services to people in need without also trying to tell them about Jesus, he said.
“One thing I noticed in seminary, helping out at Catholic apostolates, when they did work for the poor and with the poor, they wouldn’t evangelize well,” he said. “They would give people food, like handouts and stuff, but they wouldn’t try to tell people about the story of salvation, and share Jesus with people and really proclaim the faith.”
That’s why in every room of Full of Grace Cafe, there are scripture verses on the wall and pictures of saints. “And they’re really diverse saints, because I want everyone who comes to see a saint who looks like them,” he said, from Our Lady of Kibeho to Our Lady of Guadalupe to Fr. Augustus Tolton, St. Jose Sanchez, St. Dymphna, Saints Peter and Paul and more.
“So whether you’re white, black, Asian or Hispanic, you’re going to see someone who looks like you who’s a saint, so you’re going to be inspired. You’re going to see scriptures on the wall. You’re going to meet people who aren’t just going to give you a hand-out, but who are going to ask you your story and ask if they can pray with you. I want it to be a place where people would legit encounter Jesus.”
He’s also hoping that he will find an order of religious sisters who will fill the convent in the back of the cafe and help out at the parish.
“I want nuns!” he said. So far he’s had a few different orders of religious sisters come and visit to see if the parish would fit them.
“I want nuns who love Jesus and who love the poor and who love the Blessed Sacrament,” he said.
Johnson said one of the most rewarding things about Full of Grace Cafe has been seeing how willing his parishioners are to pitch in and share their gifts with the community.
“They’re like my kids,” he said of his parishioners. “It’s like wow, I’m younger than them because I’m only 31, but I’m like oh man, look at my kids, they’re happy about this, they’re excited about doing ministry.”
“I recognize I am a limited member of the Body of Christ,” he added. “I’m a necessary member for sure, but I’m very limited, my role is limited, so if I can just build up my parishioners to say yes to being the particular member of the body of Christ that they’re called to be, I’ve done my job well because then we’re gonna run, we’re gonna thrive.”
The projects at Holy Rosary parish and Full of Grace Cafe have only just begun.
Taking another cue from Mother Teresa, the next step for Johnson is, unsurprisingly, building an adoration chapel and setting up perpetual adoration.
“I’ve been telling people ok, now, we have to set up perpetual adoration because I don’t want any of us to become a bunch of heretics out here thinking we’re gonna work our way to heaven,” he said. “We’ve got to focus on the Eucharist and we’re going to see so much more supernatural fruit.”
He said that when Mother Teresa’s sisters prioritized time in prayer in front of the Eucharist, they saw their order and apostolates flourish in new ways.
“We’re going to follow the model of saints,” he said. “We’re going to next focus on getting an adoration chapel built so that we can have really hardcore time of just Jesus and I, and adore the Lord and watch him work! Watch the Lord do his thing, and he will, he will. It’s so exciting.”
All photos courtesy of Fr. Joshua Johnson.
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Read his marching orders earlier. “Additionally, the document calls for more lay participation in all ecclesiastical decision making. It specifically calls for more women in leadership roles but does not settle the question about a possible women’s diaconate. It also condemns exclusion based on a person’s ‘marital situation, identity, or sexuality’”.
He can’t be serious. A pastor is condemned if he refuses Trans folks to advise how to pastor his parish? But unfortunately he is. Although what right in heaven or hell does a pontiff have to condemn, or even suggest condemnation [by God?] if a priest declines? In an earlier CNA article “Pope cites ‘Amoris laetitia’ on doctrine in synodal implementation note” Pope Francis urged we apply the doctrines layed out in Amoris Laetitia. Those doctrines are primarily the primacy of conscience and mitigation theory. Amoris does not replace the Gospels.
“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
“Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs,”
Unless those traditions and local needs involve attending the TLM, then sorry, no synoding for you.
Also can’t wait for the local LGBTQ crowd to suddenly start demanding changes to the mass to suit their needs.
Looks like “synodality” is synonymous to “Realpolitik”.
DOA as far as I’m concerned.
“[The final document] participates in the ordinary magisterium of the successor of Peter, and as such, I ask that it be accepted,” Francis wrote…”
There is a definition of the ordinary magisterium in the CCC (#891 and some other paragraphs). Also I believe in the documents of Vatican II. The teaching magisterium consists of the bishops with the pope. This synod document that the pope signed is not from the bishops, but from a group consisting of bishops, priests, nuns and laity. How could this be part of the magisterium? I don’t believe it can.
Also, the pope asks that it be accepted. If it truly was part of the magisterium I would think that he would state that it must be accepted.
What’s the rush?
The Pachamama Apostasy Cult: “Implement the authoritative indications of the Synod on Synodality document now.”
The Son of the Living God: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Get thee behind me….”
The “Synod on Synodality document is part of the authentic teaching of the Bishop of Rome.”
The crowning achievement of the career of the Pontiff Francis is that he has communicated that he is a monumental fraud, and as such he adds something without authenticity to library which likewise is devoid of authenticity.
Zero plus Zero = Zero.
And as a reminder about the shelf life of this man’s “teaching,” Archbishop Scicluna of Malta, sycophant of Pontiff Francis, has established that this particular Pontiff’s teaching apparently gets buried with him, since by the rule-of-Scicluna, his cult only regards the teaching of “this current pope, not previous popes.” But I may be mistaken about Scicluna, he may regard the Pontiff Francis as an oracle, in which case, for Scicluna, and other such sycophants, the Pontiff Francis remains pope forever, even in death, and to him they pledge their loyalty…forever and ever.
It matters not at all what a man proclaims regarding his belief about the existence of God and how he tries to convince himself in some abstract way that he does believe in God.
If a man denies the immutability of truth, he is an atheist, even if he denies the implications of his beliefs to himself.
How much dire can the state of the Church be than to have an atheist for a pope and a prevailing episcopate too spineless to challenge him?
True Edward. Unless our faith is in God, whose existence is perfect and unchanging, pure dynamic, our belief is instead conceptual, imperfect, always subject to revision.
And, yet, about “always subject to revision” is not to be misunderstood as by some synodalers:
“The faithful therefore must shun the opinion, first, that dogmatic formulas (or some categories of them) cannot signify truth in a determinate way, but can only offer changeable approximations to it, which to a certain extent distort or alter it; secondly, that these formulas signify truth only in an indeterminate way, this truth being like a goal that is constantly being sought by means of such approximations. Those who hold such an opinion do not avoid dogmatic relativism and they corrupt the concept of the Church’s infallibility relative to the truth to be taught or held in a determinate way” (“Mysterium Ecclesia: Declaration in Defense of the Catholic Doctrine on the Church Against Certain Errors of the Day,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, June 24, 1973).
With St. Augustine: “We can say things differently, but we can’t say different things.”
As was the case of what was “believed” by Mary reported at Lk 1:45 as in uncertainty (cf. Lk 1:29, 34).
What do you call a shepherd with no place guide his sheep? Or, put another way, with no clear preference where his sheep end up?
Lately I have been studying Henri de Lubac and how he navigated the period where his theology was scrutinized by the Pope Pius XII. One of my questions is were Jesuits more learned then? Jesuits of today seem to “clot up” on major points of Tradition/Doctrine, if not create new doctrine out of whole cloth.
I want to be loyal to Mother Church and never found to be throwing a rock at the artwork – even when it belongs to Rupnik.
Every time I turn around this trial becomes more challenging, more difficult, if not impossible.
Fuzziness, that is also the Anglican solution to things; and just look where they are!
Ornery wideloopers I’ll say!
Here for once we are not speaking of orientation, but disorientation.
In Francis’ Magisterially Synodal Church: The synodally dialogic church will participate in pagan tradition, and pagan tradition will participate in Francis’ church.
Roman Catholics will continue in the unity of such a church under such a pontiff, but Christ will remain as the Triumphally Suffering Head. Roman Catholics will continue to hold the faith and hope of knowing that Christ our Head lives through, survives, and overcomes death.
Let us make jest of the lazy, ridiculous, the glaringly sad stupidity of any vatican-led holes to hell.
If you do not feel righteous anger over the reign of Jorge Bergoglio, your love for Mother Church is seriously deficient.
Please speak with accurate language. We’re told the document comes from the magisterium of the Bishop of Rome, then Francis tells us it’s of a pontifical magisterium, your commentary says it’s from the magisterium of the Church. What level will the next commentator reach? Will he consider the document as divinely revealed?
I know that a good writer always tries to avoid repetition when writing, but inasmuch as in temporal affairs you can use equivalent terms such as “Biden has decided X” , “Washington has decided X”, and “the United States has decided X”, that’s not how it works in ecclesiastical affairs. The qualifiers of magisterium between the Bishopric of Rome, the Papal office and the Church are not interchangeable just like that. This sort of spurious and deceptive language paves the way for novel doctrines on papal infallibility, and ought to thus utterly be rejected.
The directives are sufficiently vague, and thus can be safely ignored, given that most parishes already have healthy lay participation and are already in obedience to the *magisterial* intent of the document. The intent of the malcontents who were trying to use the synod as a way to democratize the Church is another question, but thankfully their intent doesn’t have to be considered.
Left-leaning bishops will use this as an excuse to make their untenable parishes even more untenable, but overall the effect will be negligible. Carry on.
The Synod was simply a thin cover for normalizing more garbage into the church. I cannot see myself cooperating with a woman deacon nor will I be interacting in a church setting with anyone who is “trans”. Ever. No thanks. I will quit my church ministry first.This Pope has been a complete disaster.
Your report misrepresents the Synodal document on the subject of sexuality when it says: “It also condemns exclusion based on a person’s “marital situation, identity, or sexuality.” The Synodal document does not do that. It only uses the word “sexuality” once, when it says: “Many participants were delighted and surprised to be asked to share their thoughts and to be given the opportunity to have their voices heard in the community. Others continued to express the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital status, identity or sexuality.” That is not a condemnation of exclusion on the basis of “sexuality”. A homosexual, for example, may feel excluded because the Church treats the acts involved in any active homosexual relationship as sinful and does not accord their relationship the same status as a heterosexual relationship. That will and must, of course, continue.
Stephen, given that “ecumenical new church” has ordered the Catholic world to bless gay couples – in the style of James Martin – your final statement only holds true for disobedient Traditionalists whom Bergolio labels “rigid” and is actively persecuting from underground China to downtown Chicago.
“A homosexual, for example, may feel excluded because the Church treats the acts involved in any active homosexual relationship as sinful and does not accord their relationship the same status as a heterosexual relationship. That will and must, of course, continue.”
This is because these demeaning sexual acts, deny the Sanctity of the marital act, within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, which is Life-affirming and Life-sustaining and can only be consummated between a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife. While it is true that some marriages deny the Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, resulting in the engaging in of demeaning sexual acts which are sinful because they deny the inherent Dignity of the human person, all same-sex sexual relationships deny the Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, and thus demean the inherent Dignity of the human person, and are thus sinful.
I pray that the next Pope will take this document, and along with Amoral Leticia, Traditiones Custodes and Tutti Frutti, toss it on the bonfire. I’m sick and tired of this Synodal garbage which has obsessed this Pontificate even though it’s a colossal waste of time, especially since there are more urgent matters for the Church to be concerned with, like persecution of Christians in China, Nicaragua and Africa, Gender Ideology in the West, and the war in Ukraine.
👉👈
We are all Protestants now PF
In the Church of What’s Happening Now
I reject that PF.
I repeat with apology:
PF is obviously a disciple of the Jesuit hairy tick Teihard de Chardin.
See excellent new book “Theistic Evolution” in which Wolfgang Smith disembowels his multiple anti Christian fantasies. This is what infects our Jesuit pontiff.
Listen to the advice given to St Augustine “ Take and read”.
Hat tip to William Briggs.
“…Jesuit hairy tick…”
Delightful!
A hearty and Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Catholic Americans!
Last Saturday, November 23, Gerhard Cardinal Muller provided his personal rejection of the Francis’ Synodal Church Model. His rejection was printed in the First Things Catholic website and is entitled, “The 7 Sins Against the Holy Spirit; A Synodal Tragedy.” That’s right, finally a true “Catholic” Prince of the Church has condemned Francis’ Synod in simple and powerful TRUTHS of the One True Catholic Apostolic Tradition. Cardinal Muller, the former Head of the Congregation of the Faith in Rome, demolishes this new false model with great words of wisdom. He does so in a way that is incisive, precise, and Heavenly! And now that he has officially and publicly pointed out the fact that serious apostasy is at the doorstep of Francis’ Pontificate, then how soon will this heroic and holy prelate suffer white martyrdom, just as Vigano, Strickland and many other holy priest have been. Yes, in a sense it can be said that these souls, orthodox Catholic souls, are now living martyrs for the Catholic Faith.
I strongly encourage Mr. Olson, CWR Editor, an all on this site to read what the Cardinal writes in a five minute read. I can assure you that you will be very hopeful after having read what this saintly man of Christ writes as he truly speaks TRUTH to evil power.
Viva La Christo! and JCALAS Forever!
Presto, Change-O!
Come quickly, Lord Jesus!