The past year has been a time for changes and continued outreach to the community at Columbus St. Dominic Church’s two campuses.
The church, at 455 N. 20th St., has added Masses for the area’s Cameroonian and French-speaking communities and has a new pastor, Father Jude Esau Fongouck. Its parish center continues to serve meals three days a week to as many as 240 people and its religious education program has become more family-oriented.
The church’s St. John Community Cener at 640 S. Ohio Ave. continues to be the home for several social service and adult education activities and to serve as a meal site daily except Sunday, as well as continuing a weekly food distribution program.
It’s located in the former Columbus St. John School, next to the Holy Rosary-St. John Church building, which has not served as a worship site since mid-2024, when its congregation and that of St. Dominic were merged.
Father Fongouck, known familiarly by St. Dominic parishioners as Father Jude, a priest for 15 years, comes from Cameroon, a central African nation where Catholics make up about 40 percent of the population, giving it one of the strongest Catholic presences on the continent.
He replaced Father Antony Varghese, CFIC, as pastor in July. Father Varghese remains pastoral administrator of Columbus St. Francis of Assisi Church.
Father Fongouck said he was recruited by Bishop Earl Fernandes through the bishop’s friend, Bishop Jerome Feudjio of the U.S. Virgin Islands, specifically to serve Cameroonian and French-speaking Catholics of central Ohio at St. Dominic, which has been primarily a community of African American Catholics for about 60 years.
The church has Masses every Sunday at 10 a.m. featuring its long-established Gospel choir, with Masses for the Cameroonian community in English at 1 p.m. on the first and third Sundays of each month and in French at the same time on the second and fourth Sundays. The schedule changes for solemnities such as the feasts of Corpus Christi and the Holy Family, with one bilingual Mass at 11 a.m.
“Those Masses have become a real treat and something to look forward to because of how they unite the various smaller communities within our larger parish community,” said Sheila Jones, who volunteers for the St. Dominic breakfast and lunch program. “I’d like to see more of them.”
The church hosted a Mass for all African ethnic groups on Sunday, Dec. 7 with Bishop Fernandes celebrating.
Father Esua said 125 to 150 people generally come to the Cameroonian Masses, with attendance as high as 240 on Christmas and Easter. About 60 people attend the Masses in French, which formerly took place at Columbus Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church. He said that because it involves driving a greater distance for most of the French-speaking Catholics, fewer people go to those Masses since they were moved.
“It’s a necessity for most every one to speak English if they want to have a job, but being able to have a Mass where they can identify with the culture familiar to them is extremely important to the Cameroonian and French-speaking populations,” Father Fongouck said. “Having those Masses plus our regular Sunday Masses provides an example of unity in diversity.”
He said St. Dominic has about 240 registered parishioners, with people coming to the parish from throughout Franklin County and from as far away as Lancaster and Chillicothe because of the type of Masses celebrated there.
Father Fongouck also is a chaplain at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center and University Hospital East, where he serves on Tuesdays and Thursdays and in cases of sacramental emergency.
“I work at the parish office, which is at the St. John Center, on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I’m able to keep an eye on happenings there. On Saturdays, I check with the choir and prepare the liturgy and homilies. Sunday of course is for Masses and Mondays are my off days. The variety of activities has quickly gotten me busy and very involved in Columbus in my short time here,” he said.
“Father Jude is very sociable and wants to come to people’s houses,” Jones said. “It’s great to have someone willing to do that. He’s only been here a short time, but makes you feel so comfortable you can talk to him about anything. I’ve been seeing new people coming to Mass every Sunday, so he seems to be having a positive impact.”
Jones, her aunt, Bunny Neal, and Patrice Smith, a resident of the parish neighborhood, have been doing most of the cooking since the parish center began serving home-cooked meals in July 2023. The meal program is known as Cecil’s Café in honor of longtime parish employee Cecil Douglas. It serves breakfast from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. and lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
“We don’t have a web page or anything else to promote what we do, but it doesn’t seem to matter,” she said. “It’s all word of mouth. People just hear about us and they keep coming. We feed 175 to 240 people for lunch and 50 to 75 for breakfast.
“Many of the ones at breakfast are school kids. They can get school breakfasts but say they’d rather come here because what they get at school doesn’t taste as good as we make, probably because we do all our cooking from scratch.
“I don’t even like cooking that much, but I love the smiles on those kids’ faces and on the people who are our regulars.”
Jones said that for Thanksgiving, Cecil’s Café provided 667 baskets with turkeys donated by parishioners from Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church and the New Albany Church of the Resurrection, plus other holiday food. She said about 275 baskets went to people who regularly come to the weekday meals, with the rest to neighborhood residents.
Meals at the St. John Center campus have been served since 1979 by the Community Kitchen, Inc., an organization that began as a nonprofit ministry in 1979 and since 1985 has been a federal 501-c-3 nonprofit operating independently of the church, with a board of directors representing the community.
The kitchen is open from 8 to 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on weekdays and 8:30 to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Its president and chief executive officer, MJ McCleskey, said it serves about 150,000 meals annually and delivers meals to other locations.
It shares space in the St. John Center basement with the St. John Food Pantry, which remains a program of the parish and has been open since the 1980s. Its hours are 9 to 10:30 a.m. Thursdays.
“We’ve given out about 3,500 food packages this year. With three meals per package, that makes about 10,500 individual meals,” said Rose Moses, pantry volunteer coordinator, who has been involved with the pantry for more than 20 years. Packages include one bag of perishable foods (meat, milk, fruit, etc.), mostly from the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, and two bags of nonperishables from churches and other organizations.
“This summer, the numbers started to increase and that was to be expected with the cutbacks to several federal programs. Yesterday (Dec. 4) we had 10 new families. The cuts haven’t affected us too much because of the support we get from parishes and from volunteers who help us maintain the Catholic presence at the pantry and in the neighborhood.
“Deacon Dave (Bezusko, diocesan director of charities) is working on forming a network of all the Catholic food pantries in the diocese and we look forward to being a part of that.”
Moses said her pantry received Thanksgiving turkeys from St. Paul and Christ the King churches this year and was assisted throughout the year by Columbus St. Catharine, Dublin St. Joan of Arc and Columbus-Powell St. Peter St. Joan of Arc Church, as well as the Knights of St. Peter Claver auxiliary, the River House apartments and others.
During the Christmas season, the pantry distributes hats, gloves and blankets from the Gahanna St. Matthew the Apostle Church knitting ministry.
Charlene Brown, parish religious education director, said there has been much more parental involvement in the Parish School of Religion recently, in line with recommendations by Bishop Fernandes.
“We had parents come to the classes with their children once a month for the past couple of years while the children attended weekly. This year, we’ve changed and the parents and children both come every week.” Classes are from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.
Brown said about 10 parents and 10 children come to the weekly classes. “It’s a hybrid,” she said. “We start as one large group, then break down into smaller units not by age but by the sacrament you’re preparing for – First Communion or Confirmation.”
“With the diocese in the process of changing the age for Confirmation, the age range for the current Confirmation group (which consists of five students) is between 10 and 15,” she said. “We don’t divide groups by age, but by what kind of faith formation a child has gone through.
“Many children don’t know the basics of being Catholic and need to understand that before preparing for a sacrament. For that reason, formation takes two years, the first to understand the faith and the second getting into more specific aspects of the sacrament.
“We don’t use a specific program because it’s more important to bring children to an experience of Jesus rather than follow a rigid format. We use the Bible, the Lectionary and prayers that are basic in some ways and specific in others. We also refer to a program called Blest Are We, mostly for guidelines rather than structure.”
Service projects are part of the program. Students and parents helped pack Thanksgiving bags last year and are sending cards to sick and homebound parishioners for Christmas.
The St. John Learning Center has been offering quarterly GED classes since the 1980s. Teresa Lee, its coordinator since 2022, said the next classes will begin Tuesday, Jan. 6.
Students in the classes take a placement test that positions them in one of two levels of study. The first level gives students enough general knowledge to go to the second level, which gets them ready to take the GED high school equivalency test.
New classes start approximately every three months, but there’s no set term for when classes end for each student. That depends on the time it takes for an individual to complete each level.
Lee said the center in 2026 will continue to host a monthly series on mental health issues titled “Stop the Stigma,” as well as a job fair scheduled for Thursday, May 14, a resource fair in October and classes on starting and running a small business and how to clean up credit problems.
She’s also working with the city of Columbus to bring in a workforce planning program teaching skills related to obtaining a job for students who have earned a GED diploma. A health management program in cooperation with city and state health agencies also is possible. Lee said more information on coming events will be available on the center’s website as plans are completed.
“The center is important because it’s a resource that’s available to anyone and all programs are free,” Lee said. “We don’t know how federal government changes might affect what we do, so I urge people to take advantage now of the things we offer.”
To learn more about the center and check its schedule of events, go to stjohnlearning.wordpress.com or call (614) 547- 2171.
The center also has been the site of a care center offered since 2017 by the Columbus region of the Order of Malta. The center is open Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with a dental clinic twice a month.
It offers health screenings and basic medical, wound, burn, dental and foot care from volunteer physicians, podiatrists and dentists from the Catholic Medical Association, along with medical referrals for those needing advanced levels of care. It does not bill insurance or Medicare but operates solely on donations. It also provides packages of hygiene supplies, undergarments, socks, T-shirts, gloves and hats, when available.
Donations to St. Dominic are always welcome. Go to stdominic-church.org/online-giving to give online. To donate by check, the address is St. Dominic Catholic Church, Box 83572, Columbus, OH 43203. For more information, call (614) 252-5926, extension 202.