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The youngest priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge has a few confessions about his faith and his music: He didn’t like the Catholic Church as a youth, tried for years to run from his calling as a priest, and doesn’t want to be known only as the “Rapping Priest.”
The Rev. Joshua Johnson, serving at Christ the King Catholic Church at Louisiana State University, is 27, and in his first year as a priest.
“I was raised Catholic, but I just never liked the Catholic Church growing up. I thought it was boring, and I didn’t understand it,” said Johnson, a native of Baton Rouge whose rapping has brought him a measure of renown on YouTube and social media.
He hosts the hip-hop show “Tell the World” on Catholic radio.
Johnson’s biggest difficulty with the church was with the Eucharist: “I never believed that it was the body and blood of Jesus Christ that the Catholic Church teaches.”
That changed one summer night before his senior year at Lee High School, during a retreat in Alexandria.
He attended “Eucharistic Adoration,” when a piece of consecrated altar bread — the Holy Eucharist or host — is the focus of devotion and meditation.
“That night in adoration, when the bishop exposed Jesus Christ with the Eucharist, all I could say was it was God’s grace that overcame me,” Johnson said.
“And looking at the Eucharistic prayer, I knew it was God, that it was Jesus Christ. It was as if I fell in love in an instant. I started crying. I was on my knees worshipping God.”
The long ache in his heart was lifted, he said.
“The first thing I heard him say was ‘I love you,’ and it pierced my heart then and it continues to pierce my heart today, because I was living in pretty serious sin, but he told me he loved me.”
Johnson said he was also told to become a priest. Instead, he said, he enrolled at Southern University. Continue reading
Sources
- Huffington Post
- Image: ChurchPOP
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