The Dominus Project

Dr. Brian Pedraza:

Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Holy Habits in the house, and we want these holy habits to be not just in the pews, not just in the classroom, but really, we want to bring it into the house. I am Dr. Brian Pedraza, Professor of Theology at FranU and Director of The Dominus Project and to my right is my Father, my brother, my friend, Father Josh Johnson.

Fr. Josh Johnson: What is up, how are you doing? 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: I'm doing great, man.

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

It's so good to be with you and our friends.  We have Jennifer Monette and Brandy Fauria joining us. How are y'all doing, ladies?

Jennifer Monette: Great, great. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: And we go way back. I mean... 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: This is what I hear, you got some old friends! 

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

Yes, so Brandy and I go back to middle school, eighth grade at Kenilworth Middle.  That is when we first met, right? 

Brandi Fauria: Yeah!

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

And then Jennifer Monette and I go back to St. Aloysius, my second assignment. There are so many stories that I have with both of these ladies because, we pray a lot and we have done a lot of ministries together over the years, but we still also party, in virtuous ways, because Jesus Christ is the life of the party. His very first miracle was at a wedding and so the Lord clearly loves to dance and drink with virtue and temperance, but yes, we hang out and there's so many stories we have. 

So, before we get to Holy Habits in the House, we can talk about stuff. Let us start with N-SYNC, Brandy. 

Brandy is a big fan of NSYNC and Justin Timberlake. So, would you say that you think his earlier music is better than his newer stuff or his newer stuff better than his earlier stuff. 

Brandi Fauria: 

Okay, so I think I would probably say that NSYNC would be a lot better than Justin.  When I listen to the music, it takes me back to when I was a teenager. So, when I hear it, I get excited, I'm like, I'm going to dance. It takes me back to that time to where I did not have bills and responsibilities, so it is nostalgic. Like, it is happy music, you know it makes me think about being in eighth grade and being a kid again. 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

Yes, that explains why that NSYNC poster is taped behind your front door(laughter). 

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

Okay, and speaking of dancing, Jennifer Monette, you are from New Orleans. 

Jennifer Monette: Oh, yes, I am. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

And you have some favorite dances, I am sure from your childhood. What was your “go to” dance move, back in the day?

Jennifer Monette: Goodness, I do not even know, we did everything. 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: I do not know, was it the Roger Rabbit? 

Jennifer Monette: 

The Bus Stop is like quintessential New Orleans, the Bus Stop. You cannot be from New Orleans and go to a family function, a wedding, whatever and not know how to do the Bus Stop. All the new line dances, they're all a variation of the Bus Stop, the original, the O.G.

Fr. Josh Johnson: The O.G

Dr. Brian Pedraza:  I come from California, and I have no idea what the Bus Stop is. 

Jennifer Monette: Oh, I have to show you, yeah, I have to teach you. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: We will have to invite him to one of the parties. 

Jennifer Monette: Yes, yes! 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

It is a real blessing to have you all on the show today and the thing that we really want to talk about is, habits of community. One of the things I was thinking about, when it comes from the gospels, is that for most of time, families have been a lot bigger than what we call the nuclear family. It always takes a village, in other words. I was thinking about that scene in the gospel where Jesus is lost, and they have to find him in the temple. That's after a full day that Mary and Joseph are like, “wait a minute, where's Jesus?”.  That means you must have the kind of context where a kid can be gone for a full day, which to us, is weird. Today, you got to have GPS on your kid or something like that, right? If your kids are out, riding bikes in the neighborhood, your neighbors are ready to call the police or something. That shows you, for most of the time, you could be out away from your nuclear family, but that's because you had tons of family, tons of friends that really made up what family life is supposed to be. 

So, in a way, we want to learn from y’all about what it takes to really build the habits of community, in your home and the habits of community that people can build to try and help the people in a home. Let us start from the inside and then we can work our way outside. So, community in your own home, what is your own experience of trying to build community in your family, for your family? How has that been for you all personally, building community? 

Jennifer Monette: 

Well, let's start with Brandy and I both have broken families. So, I think we should start by saying that just because you may come from a broken family, which is very common today, doesn't negate the call to holiness. 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: Amen!

Jennifer Monette:  

We all have a unique call to holiness and regardless of what that looks like, if your family may be broken, that does not mean that God does not still call you to greatness.  God still calls you to help your family in holiness. So, I am divorced, and Brandy is a single parent, and I am sure there are a lot of single parents out there that don't know how to get started on the path to getting your family on the right track.  Sin is real and sin has affected a lot of families today. So, how do we in the midst of that, still get on the journey to holiness?  So, for us, how do I be a single parent and still help my kids and help my family become holy?  We have found a certain niche of community that we have been working with in small groups and Bible studies, with some women who are similar.  We can invite our kids; they will come with us because that is the reality of the nature of our situation.  You cannot leave your kids if you are a single parent. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

Remember, you and I had dinner one night. The origin of your group coming together was Brandi and I, we go back to high school and at this point, Jennifer had been doing Bible studies at Holy Rosary.  You came to me one night, we had dinner, I think at Mike Anderson's in Gonzales. 

Brandi Fauria: Oh yeah, yeah. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

And I was like, I recognize my limitations as a priest and I can't walk with her in this way, but I had a connection to my friend Jennifer and I think that y'all could connect and then y'all connected and then other women, who were also single parents or divorced or just in different situations or similar situations, got together, and that's how your bible study began.  It completely transformed your lives, then more women started joining and more women were like “I want to join that too” and then all the kids were growing in holiness, it was very beautiful because you take the kids to the church while ya’ll were meeting and bringing them to the chapel. 

Brandi Fauria: 

Just the way the group even came about, you knew it was the Holy Spirit. We were trying to find people at one point, and it was almost like they were just being drawn to us or brought to us. We mentioned it, we were kind of like, we're going to see what's going to happen and they just kept coming and it grew, and it grew. 

I mean, the kids, we're doing our Bible study, but they're in the other room and they're all forming their little community together as we're reading scriptures, discussing it all together.  The way it worked out, how the group of women came together, it was beyond anything we could have done. 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

The Holy Spirit doing something there, calling people because we all need community in this particularly special way. I love that the kids could be gathering at the same time, because I feel like, in a lot of our church events and things that we make for adults, I’m like, “find a babysitter, where am I going to put that in my budget?”  So, to have a place for the kids to gather at the same time, that's beautiful. 

Jennifer Monette: 

Yeah, it was just Holy Spirit, because we happen to be at Holy Rosary and we were like, “Father, we have to bring the kids” and so we had an adjoining room, Moms sat on the sofas in one room, we did our Bible study. The kids were in the next room over with the TV, and we brought snacks and lunch and things like that, and we do it on a Sunday and it was great. So now the kids are growing up together and now they have a little niche of friends that they know from church, from life, because it's more than just church now. They've grown up, literally, grown up together.

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

I love it! Take me back to the point where you are thinking about having community. Brandy, so you're thinking, “I've got a kid. I know I need people to help me grow in holiness.”.  I feel like a lot of people in that situation, they're going to be like, “What do I do?”  Say they start out in a new community, ok.... families that are watching this, they're like, “How do I even start this, because I feel weird going up to people saying, I'm looking for friends”. You know what I mean? What was that like? 

Brandi Fauria:  

Yeah, that's how I felt, because the closer I got in my faith, you know, some of my older friends, those relationships kind of fell on the backburner and I was searching for people like me, women who wanted to grow in holiness. That's when I reached out to Father Josh and said “I kind of need help.”

I go to some churches, and you don't see very many single parents and I needed that connection with people and that was what I was searching for.  I was thankful that he introduced me to her, and it worked out. Yeah, I would go to mass, and I would kind of not feel comfortable 100% and I was looking for somewhere to belong and looking for somewhere I needed to be and thankfully I was able to find that. The community just kept growing with the Bible studies 

Fr. Josh Johnson:  

I think it's important for all of us to see, particularly, when we go to mass, when we see a single mother or single father or a new family that clearly doesn't know many people in the community, to reach out to them and to invite them, to take the initiative. 

Jesus Christ, he would go out and invite people to worship, He didn't wait for people to come to him, He would go to them.  So for us to just be attentive, to be aware because there are probably so many people who might come to mass, and they're like, “ I felt so excluded, I felt ignored, I didn't feel seen, I didn't feel wanted, so I'm not going to go back” because  they felt out of  place, but, if we see somebody and automatically go to them. That's what we would do, Jennifer, we would see somebody, and I would say, “Jennifer, go get em” and you would right after mass. 

We noticed that we saw a single parent at mass, we would run after them and invite them to the Bible study. So, it's very intentional, go grab them and invite them to this, and then they would come because we all want community. 

John Paul II, his holiness began when, after his dad died, his mom died when he was young, his brother and sister passed away it was just him and his father. When his dad died, when was 20, he felt all alone in the world because many of his friends were in jail or they were killed, they were in prison because of Nazis. He went to Mass on Sunday, not wanting to go to mass because he was struggling in the church at that time, but his dad always went to mass, so he goes to Mass. This guy, Jan Tyranowski, sees him and reaches out to him and invites him. It was that invitation from Jan Tyranowski, that got JPII plugged into a small group community. They began to meet weekly for rosary and for study of the scripture and they prayed together and the fruit of that little group of young adults who Jan Tyranowski  intentionally reached out to, because he saw that they were alone, is that 11 of them became priests, three of them became Bishops and one became Pope John Paul II.  All because he saw someone who was alone and welcomed them into community. 

Jennifer Monette: 

We have to realize that people are struggling against the lies and stigmas of society that tell us that if you're a single mom or if you're divorced, you're not welcome in the church.  That's not true? You're still welcome in the church. 

Fr Josh Johnson:

And you are called to be a Saint, because how many women are currently canonized Saints, five blessed, are declared to be a Venerable or a Servant of God who were not just married but were married and divorced or were married and separated or were never married. They're single, like Dorothy Day is a Servant of God right now, she's a Servant of God who was a single woman, who became a mother, had a baby out of wedlock, and she had an abortion at one point, and she's on the path to being a canonized Saint.  Catherine Doherty, she was divorced and annulled and she's a Servant of God. 

Rose Hawthorne, she was married and separated, and she is, I think, a Venerable now, Venerable Rose Hawthorne. All these women are on the path to be canonized and I think it's an important point for church to highlight their lives in paintings, in stain glass windows, in our statues so people can see and say, “Oh, I too, am called to the heights of Holiness”. 

Jennifer Monette: 

Right, so if you're out there struggling with, “Do I go back to the church?”, absolutely, come back to the church. The church is your home and in this state of life that you may be in, this is the place for you to be nurtured, this is the place for you to be healed, this is the place for you to find your strength so that you can go forward, in what is really a challenging way to embrace the family.  Now your family is broken and so it's more difficult, than the natural family, to succeed in life.  It's more difficult, so you need the assistance and the love of God.

Fr. Josh Johnson: God AND the community, you need both AND.

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

On a spiritual note, I want to take it into the interior place, because I feel that a lot of us, no matter what the family situation is, we've been raised in a mindset, in our communities, in our country where independence means that YOU DID IT, right? 

“I don't need anybody else, right?”, “I make enough money, I take care of my own”, “Look what I did”.   But in the Christian view of things, God is a community, the Father is not the Father apart from the Son and the Spirit. The Son is not the Son apart from Father and Spirit, you know what I'm saying?  

So, you need community, and dependence is actually part of all of our reality and a Christian way of viewing things. I wonder if part of what we have to wrestle with, no matter what your family life is like, is saying, “I really need people and that's not a weakness, in a bad sense, that is actually the way I was made”.   

I was made for community.  I won't be who I'm supposed to be without you. I don't make sense without you. On the flip side of that too, the times that we really need help, not only do we especially need physical people in our community to come and help us out, but also in this great communion of Saints, you've got the arm of St. Michael,  you've got the prayer of the Carmelites, burning for you in every convent where they're before the Blessed Sacrament.  You've got the courage of Joan of Arc and you've got all of these Saints that you can call upon to help you out. I'm wondering about the Saints as part of the Body of Christ, have they played any particular role in your family as a form of a powerful spiritual community? 

Brandi Fauria: 

Definitely, I know St. Monica is one of my favorites. I have a son who is a teenager right now, so this age is just fun, very fun. Some days he’s ready to go to mass and some days, it’s, you know, dragging to get him out of the house. So, I have been asking her (St. Monica) to intercede. I want him to be on the right path, he's surrounded by great people.  He's doing ok and he has all the tools, but I just want him to stay on the right path. 

I know I spray him with Holy Water often.  So, you know, if you have a test, ok, you need this and it's just those small things. St. Anthony Padua is another one that we love in our house.

Fr. Josh Johnson: 

Because you are losing the things all the time. 

Brandi Fauria: 

All the time, all the time! I think he is drawn to him, too. He had to do a project on him for school and he was able to learn so much about him and I think he feels like he can actually call on him and I love that he knows!  Yeah, we even do a little thing on the Hallow App, it's guess that Saint, and we turned it into a game. So, it's like who's going to guess it first this morning, who's going to figure it out first this morning, but it makes it funny competitive, and he doesn't realize he's learning more. It's a quick little thing, but he's learning from it, and I love that. 

Jennifer Monette: 

I agree 100%. The Saints are a huge part of my life. I brought my little necklace, I didn't have it on, but anybody who knows me knows my necklace.  Father would always say, he would hear me coming for confession, he's like, oh, I knew that was you. I was like, “How?” and he would say, “I heard you coming” (Jennifer shaking her necklace of medals).  It’s not all the medals, so it's not all medals.  I only put a medal on when it's somebody who I've had an encounter with at some point or some walk in my journey.  So, these medals have blessed all over, on every pilgrimage that I've been on. You know any time I encounter a relic, I bless them, but these are my brothers and sisters, and I wear them. It seems crazy, but I wear them because this is my help, this is my strength and I call upon these brothers and sisters in Christ to assist, especially in being a single parent and living in a home where I don't have a spouse on a daily basis. 

St. Joseph is one of my favorites. I'm like, St. Joseph, you need to be the Foster Father of our house, you know? My children's father is present but not present on a daily basis, I don't have a man in the house. So, if something is broken, St. Joseph, listen, you got to find me somebody to fix it.   After the hurricane, I prayed for St. Joseph to find me an honest person to come and help me do my repairs and guess what? I found a nice little Catholic man who goes to daily Mass, and he was a contractor. I was like, “Thank you, St. Joseph.”  

So just calling upon the Saints, the Blessed Mother....oh my goodness, the Saint of all Saints. The Blessed Mother, just help me be a good mom!  It's just really difficult and it's even more difficult, being a single parent. I have two daughters, and I just want her to help me be a mother and be the mother that I'm not when I'm lacking because I certainly don't have all that it takes to be a good mom, let her be the mother for them. 

Fr. Josh Johnson:

This is great, I think that there are three takeaways that I want to invite our family parish to.  The three takeaways are number one, I want to invite everybody to do research on the Saints and to find the one Saint to grow in relationship with this year.  A Saint to be your friend, to walk with you, to pray for you, to intercede for you from heaven. The second thing is that I want to invite all of our families to reach out to a cloistered convent of Carmelite sisters or monks. A cloistered community and ask them to pray for your family. Invite them to pray for your family because that's what they do. They want to pray, so we can write a letter, we can email them. We have some coming to Louisiana right down the street. They love to pray.  So find a cloistered community, the friars, monks, nuns, and invite them to intercede for your family. Number three is the big one now. The big one is to walk with one person this year. So, I look around, see who's at church and alone or who's at church right now, and do four things. One, begin to pray for that person and say “God, is this the person you want me to walk with?”  If you feel confirmed that that's the person, one person, one family you're talking about, then intercede for them. After you intercede for them, I want to invite you to reach out to them for normal things like coffee, wine or cocktails, golfing or normal things, just being human with them.  Invest in friendship with them, and then after you've invested in friendship with them, then you will have discerned, I know this person pretty well, what might be best for them is maybe not going to mass with me right away. It might be a Bible study, it might be let's go to the soup kitchen. 

“Hey, I'm going to a soup kitchen, will you come with me?”   

“I'm doing this Bible study, you want to join my Bible study?”  

“I'm going to go to Adoration, do you want to come with me?” 

“I'm going to go to the sacrament of reconciliation, do you want to come with me?” 

“I'm going to go to Sunday mass, come with me.” 

Ask the Lord, who's that person?  Identify that person and pray for them.  Invite them to friendship, and then finally discern what's best for that person, their family. Obviously, mass is like the goal.  Mass, but sometimes we have to start with small steps.

Dr. Brian Pedraza: 

 We don't want to hit him with the Jesus truck at first. Yeah, Lord was gradual in the Old Testament before he gave us Jesus, we're going to till that soil.

Fr. Josh Johnson:

That's right, with love, and in the words of Justin Timberlake, if it’s it’s been a long time, step two, step two.  And if first you don't succeed, dust yourself off and try again.  

So, if it doesn't work out with that first person, sometimes we are off in our discernment, we can always walk with another person, if it doesn't seem to be fitting. 

Dr. Brian Pedraza: Thank you so much. 

Fr. Josh Johnson:  

This has been a phenomenal conversation with two future saints. 

Jennifer Monette: That's right. Hopefully, that’s the goal. 

Fr. Josh Johnson: God Bless!

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