Fr. Joe Callahan '75

Father Joseph Callahan ’75 is grateful for the academic and faith formation received at St. Mary School Elyria and ECHS. He describes the lay faculty, Sisters of Notre Dame, and Fathers of St. Joseph as “sterling people” whose personal interest in their students and professional standards provided him with a foundation for vocational discernment and further studies. He mentions Señorita Bradesca, Mrs. Hedy Fye, Father Gaetano (whom he remembers saying to him his senior year: “don’t rule out going to the seminary”), and Sister Laboure (“who instilled in us a love of reading and a passion for writing properly”) as examples. Father graduated from John Carroll University in 1979, with a B.S. in chemistry. He worked at Glidden Paints Research Center for two years and attended one year of law school at Cleveland State‘s Marshall College of Law before entering St. Mary Seminary in Cleveland, where he earned a Master of Divinity degree and was ordained in 1986. His first five years of priesthood were spent at St. Jude Parish, where he intersected many times with his alma mater EC. He then spent 16 years with the Cleveland Latin American Mission in El Salvador. As a missionary, he worked in parishes in rural parts of the country, attending to spiritual and temporal needs of a very poor and marginalized population. He also worked in various administrative positions in the Diocese of San Miguel. 

Father has continued in multi-cultural ministry here in the Diocese of Cleveland, serving two years at St. Mary Parish, Painesville and for the last 12 years as pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Cleveland. Both parishes have large Latin American immigrant populations. He earned a Doctor of Ministry with a concentration in Hispanic Ministry in the United States from Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas in 2019. He serves on several boards and committees in Cleveland and in the Diocese, including the advisory board of Cleveland Central Catholic High School. Father Joseph Callahan received the Elyria Catholic High School Distinguished Alumni Award in 1999, and John Carroll University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016.