Getting to know Edwin Johnson, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Reverend (+ video)

Edwin Daniel Johnson has always liked Dorchester, a place he calls home since his birth at Brigham Memorial Hospital back on September 29th, 1982, born of a Costa Rican mother and a father from Montserrat, an island nation in the Caribbean.

Check Rev. Johnson video message

“I grew up in a tiny house on Fayston Street, about a mile from here,” he told the Dorchester Post from his office located at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. “I liked the community because it was filled with children. In my neighborhood, there were people from all over the world. I liked that because I always had someone to play with. There was occasional drug- or gang-related violence, but only occasionally. I almost didn’t notice because I was only involved with my church and my school, a Catholic school here in Dorchester called Saint Patrick’s”.

The most important thing happening in a person’s life

Young Reverend Edwin attended Saint Patrick’s until eighth grade, where he was transferred to Noble and Greenough High School, a private school in Dedham, on a scholarship.

Asking when he decided to become a priest, he said: “When I was five years old, we went to a baptism in a church, and while I watched, I don’t know exactly, but I felt… something. I felt that baptism that was happening was the most important thing that was happening in that person’s life. And I also wanted to be the one who baptized that person. I was only five!”

When he finished high school, he attended Tufts University at Somerville. “I thought I would start at a theology school after Tufts immediately, but I took three years working as a professor”, he explains.

“There were two years where I had to do thousands of interviews, where they checked my entire past, checking my online pictures to make sure I was a good boy”, he chuckles. “Then my bishop sent me to become a seminarian in Berkeley, California”.

It was there, where he met his wife, Susan Lenn Johnson, a Wisconsin native who was studying in a Catholic university in Berkeley. They moved to Massachusetts in 2010, initially establishing in Cambridge, where they had their first son -Francisco- in 2014, and Reverend Edwin started working in Saint James Episcopal Church.

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church of Dorchester

After 3 years working at Cambridge St. James Church, Reverend Edwin picked St. Mary’s Church to do his worship. “We could pick the church where we wanted to work in, as well as the church being able to pick its priest. I said, ‘wait, you can do that?’ So being a native from Dorchester, when someone told me this church was looking for a priest, I applied and the rest is history,” Rev. Edwin explained.

Rev. Edwin considers parishioners at St. Mary’s are very diverse. Most come from the Caribbean, including many from his father’s homeland Montserrat. “My grandfather, who died when I was five years old or so, was very well known by the people who come here and remember when he was preaching. Being here I’m also learning about my ancestry,” he said. There are also many parishioners from Latin America, nearly all from Central American countries like Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, so there is a mass in Spanish at one o’clock. There are around 120 members of the parish, with around 70 or 75 on each mass, by Rev. Edwin’s estimates.

At the parish, they serve food every Tuesday for around 200 families, something of particular importance for Rev. Father Edwin. “Every Sunday after the 11 o’clock mass we host a big meal, dispense food. It’s a big part of our ministry”. And also, “we’re a church that’s organizing ourselves to become a ‘sanctuary church’ because there are a lot of immigrants in our church, some undocumented. Therefore, it’s important that we do something to support them”.

The parish started working with other churches and the Massachusetts Community Action Network. “We want to propose something like the Safe Communities Act, so we want to work with our lawmakers so we can have a community where the police and other authorities can work together and ultimately make it a safer place”.

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church is an inner city parish committed to the spiritual growth of its members, to serving the hungry, and providing a safe and enriching place for children and youth. For more information, please visit: http://stmarysdorchester.org/

By Juan Perfetti