John Juszczak

Fr. John Juszczak is the kind of priest who will learn your language so he can meet you where you are. Over the years he has picked up five of them, French, Polish, Spanish, English, and an African language most people have never heard of, not to collect them but because you cannot really care for people you cannot talk to. Wherever he has been sent, and he has been sent to a lot of places, he has made it home and made the people there his own.

He was born in Poland in 1960 and ordained there in 1988 for the Redemptorists, a missionary congregation. He is also a scholar, with studies that carried him from Poland to Paris to Chicago and a doctorate he spent on a quietly beautiful question, how the Sacrament of Reconciliation actually heals a person. But spend any time around him and you notice the learning never sits above people. It bends back toward them. Those who have come to know him tend to describe him less by his degrees than by his warmth, and by the sense that a parish is lucky to have him.

His path reads like a map of the Church's far corners. He spent eight years in the missions of West Africa, teaching, forming seminarians, and building youth programs. He served Polish, Spanish, and American communities in Chicago and ran a Polish Catholic school there. He walked alongside servicemen and women as a military chaplain. He gave years to island parishes in the Caribbean, with a gift for bringing a struggling parish and school back to life. The through line is simple. Wherever he lands he starts things, a Bible study, a youth group, a way back to steadier ground, and he leaves people more connected to their faith and to one another than he found them.

These days home is Annunciation, a small bilingual parish in West Park, Florida, the kind of place where it is easy to be known by name and where the chapel by the grotto stays open for prayer nearly all week. It suits him. After a life spent among people who started out as strangers and became his own, he seems most himself in a parish small enough to know everyone in it. He still teaches, still holds his parish in prayer, and still comes back to the words he uses to sum up his whole life, everything for the glory of God, and the love of his sisters and brothers, through the Perpetual Help of Mother Mary.