A Cajun Priest and the Acadian Solution to Soft Priests in a Soft Church

A blast is heard from up the Bayou Teche, from the direction of Leonville, Cecilia, or Breaux Bridge. Then comes the ring of a far-off bell, barely heard through the cattails and wall of cicadas, crickets, and katydids. The tolling rolls down the waterway clear and rhythmic, like the echo of an evening train passing through a rural town. 

It is August 15, and the Fête-Dieu du Teche has begun again. And just like the crushing weight of the Louisiana sun, countless Cajuns up and down the Teche will find themselves overcome. Hearts are about to break. 

For many whose homes cling to banks of the bayou—rock-ribbed Louisiana Baptists, staunch anti-papists, nonbelievers, and the long-ago fallen away—the bell echoes in the backcountry like a rooster’s crow announcing the dawn of something forgotten or pushed away. Long-closed doors to the trace of a memory begin to open and set in motion first steps back to their centuries-old Nova Scotian roots.

And what a wonderful unfolding of grace this must be for Cajun-born Fr. Michael Champagne, the Religious Superior of the Community of Jesus Crucified, who, a decade ago, imagined how a Eucharistic procession down the heart of the bayou might move something deep in souls. 

For readers unaware of the Fête-Dieu du Teche—Louisiana’s annual waterway procession on the Solemnity of the Assumption—the following is an image of its starting point: Canon fire pierces humid morning skies and sends a single boat, Vessel #1—the bell boat—down the serpentine waters that have flowed through these parts since before the birth of Christ. Thereafter, a phenomenon begins, where, over the past eleven years, Jesus Christ has floated back into the lives of fallen-away Catholics and Protestants, where an inner movement rises and begins to pull them back to the sacraments and faith of their martyred Acadian forebears. 

The bell boat alerts families to something strange happening up the Teche. So they head to swinging porch doors that open into the ancient waterway; and before they are able to fuss about their privacy being trespassed upon, boat after boat begins to appear at a bend in the bayou. 

Thereafter, a woody and warm scent overpowers the immovable loamy incense of the Teche; it is a pleasing smoke that moseys past the bank and floats like slow-motion sensory overload into backyards. Louisianans, some unmoored from the faith of their French-Canadian ancestors, feel the air becoming Catholic. Vessel #2 is the mist-covered thurible boat,purposed to burn and puff out incense that prepares the way for the Savior of the World in Vessel #3. 

When Jesus, in the Eucharist, emerges in the haze, He is high-throned on an altar in a long-stemmed golden monstrance bordered by a few dozen sharp-edged rays. He is raised high but neatly protected beneath the shade of a canopy that all but grazes the tips of silvery-gray moss dripping from tree limbs like Louisiana tinsel. A young woman passenger glorifies Him by singing old Latin songs—“Panis Angelicus,” “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” the “Ave Verum Corpus,” or any number of other hymns in a voice that carries up and down the Teche through a headset and a small microphone. The love songs to the King of Kings cut straight through the wall of swamp insects, and the tolling of the bell is forgotten. 

Onlookers see that Vessel #3 seems to be a sacred place, sardine-packed with cassocked and habited men and women in veils who, for the next eight or so hours, will kneel to adore Jesus in the bow. They will interchangeably glorify and consider His Majesty through silent contemplation or pray from breviaries, rosaries, or from the hymnals by their sides. 

Over the years, this vision of the Eucharist boat and its quiet adorers has caused many thousands of men and women to fall to their knees. Because the sensus fidei rises quickly in them, their eyes often begin to burn and well, where tears fall and mix with moistened faces. Even Protestants have admitted to a spark in the soul and different kind of feeling in their gut. They know Vessel #3 is the reason for the Fête-Dieu du Teche—so some of these converts-to-be find themselves whispering words of adoration, and, for the first time, they drop the long-guarded belief that God could not become a wafer in a host; they begin to vulnerably embrace Him as the Slaughtered Lamb hidden in True Bread. 

Thereafter, most stick around for another quarter of an hour to watch the long and lazy fleet of trailing vessels. Boat after boat floats by, filled with folks they recognize from the Piggly Wiggly or bank and post office lines. Old high school teammates and childhood friends or a neighbor or co-worker wave, where he or she has become a public witness to the Body, Soul, Blood, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. These trailing folks make periodic pit stops to dock their boat and make thirty-minute visits to old riverside churches or shaded grassy areas, where they merge with hundreds of other Catholics unable to find room on a boat but who wanted to join the pilgrimage nonetheless to pray a Rosary and Benediction.

It should be no surprise that Fr. Champagne chose to pierce hearts on the bayou. He grew up on the banks of the 125-mile-long Teche. As a school boy, he was told stories of the Acadian heroes who survived unimaginable hardship as they traveled south and down the Teche after refusing to kiss the British king’s ring. The priest had always seen the river as an escape route—the primary means of transportation for his ancestors’ 18th-century exodus from Nova Scotia. 

So, all these years later, Fr. Champagne knew how the waterway procession might become the floating torchlight that would guide secular and fallen-away Cajuns to the upheaval, when old family members were murdered by British soldiers or endured torture, persecution, and imprisonment for refusing to leave the Catholic Faith.

His work with youth had shown him how the rapid encroachment of Modernism, technology, and a draw to worldliness had softened wills and managed to separate new generations from the history of their Cajun forebears. It was his hope that the Eucharistic Procession would bring to memory the timeless love story of those who risked everything and journeyed some 2,300 miles to follow the Lamb that finally lay down in the bayou.

“Acadians knew the eye of the hurricane,” Fr. Champagne, 61, said. 

But as their world turned in the midst of the [British] upheaval, they knew Christ and His Cross stood still at the center of the eye. The Cross was beautiful to them, and they felt it was an honor to carry it.

Because Fr. Champagne grew up here—and knows the symphony of the Deep South—he understands how the confluence of the Bayou Teche and backyard Louisianans would serve as a perfect setting to bring folks back to the migratory story of their Acadian forefathers. Even better, he could float Jesus straight through the line of sight of humble and hardworking Louisianans who while away weekends and evenings looking into the two-cream coffee-colored Teche. 

The priest has sat on the same porch rockers beneath the eaves of Acadian-style homes, where parents watch children play hide-and-seek in elegantly-arranged jungles and use the trunks and wide limbs of live oaks—their backyard Giving Trees—to serve as anchorage points for hammocks, tire swings, tree forts, and shade. 

Generations of these bayou-side Cajuns have regarded their backyards as hidden-away islands that seemed to have human souls—like the teeming gardens authors J.R.R Tolkien or Michael O’Brien imagined when setting the tone for fraught journeys. 

Backyards here are choked with Gethsemane-like tangles of vines and untamed fast-growing ferns, lily pads, cattails, and other swampy plants. Bald cypresses, water tupelos, willows, and varieties of other native trees are scattered about open grassy areas and canopied by crisscrossings of shadow and light. For them, the riot of swamp insects by the water’s edge is a lullaby that muffles the rustling from water moccasins, turtles, river otters, racoons, and an occasional backyard bobcat.

Louisianans here will stand under a scorching August sun to share stories about Fr. Champagne, a man whose face reads like the language of the Bayou. It is ruddy and full and ornamented by creases, furrows, and laugh lines of a handsomely aging cowboy. He has a wide nose that looks to have broken a few times but fits pleasingly on a face that looks carved from Cajun granite. 

After an hour of captaining the thurible boat, his face resembles a catcher’s mitt left too long in the sun, cracked and seemingly hot to the touch. Part of his reddened face is covered by an unruly salt-and-pepper Old Testament beard that doesn’t seem to get many comb throughs. He has the build of a mid-weight college wrestler and his resting stance is wide and grounded. He has a merry smile and kind nature, but he doesn’t seem to be a man you’d want to fist fight. 

“He is as Cajun as Cajun gets,” a man close to Fr. Champagne said. “But God had put a stamp on his heart from the beginning of time. He would be a priest who gave God everything, and one who would listen at His feet in Adoration.”

It has been during his daily Holy Hour—or often, hours—that the multilayered plagues afflicting both society and the Catholic Church have pressed upon his heart. Much of the disorder and malformed consciences of today, he believes, has run unabated because of comfort and softness in the priesthood and Church. 

“Unless we’re dying to ourselves each day, are we really cooperating in the process of Jesus’s crucifixion? Are we expanding ourselves?” he asked. 

It is through our sacrifices, work, sweat, and prayer that we take the pilgrimage of the Acadians. Real Catholicism deals with suffering; if a Cajun is faithful to his roots, he’s strong and able. He’s willing to give all for Our Lady and Jesus.

As far as today’s Church, we’re not capable of having any more John Wayne priests on horseback and out on the range unless they’re trained through hard work. There are too many soft priests, but it’s not their fault; they’re being raised and trained that way. There’s no cheap grace. St. Francis of Assisi said that Jesus will look at our souls at our judgement, but he’ll also look at our hands. 

When you move away from the dignity of hard work, you move away from the Cross, and that’s when things fall apart. …The problem with so many clergy today is not chastity. It’s worldliness. You can’t have men defending your country who are soft. And you can’t have men in collars defending souls who you think are soft. There must be a cost. Redeeming the world means stepping into it and taking it on.

In a distinctive way, Fr. Champagne has taken on Christ’s mandate to care for the disadvantaged, the overlooked, and the poor. His round-the-clock love for this set—and for all kinds of unseen folks—was shaped by eavesdropping on the Cajun-French chatter of hardworking men gathered outside of Champagne’s Marché. As a boy, he worked as a sort of stock hand for the family-run rural grocery at the corner of Highway 103 and 31 in Leonville. Back in the late ’60s, the market—set to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year—was run by his grandmother, a no-nonsense woman known for fair prices on everything from groceries to salt blocks, lamp oil, fertilizers, chicken feed, and small-farm essentials.

Though he was raised a farm boy, don’t mistake Fr. Michael Champagne for a Cajun backwoods hick priest. He speaks four languages fluently and has authored what may be the only comprehensive theological work exploring the spiritual union between St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Teresa of Calcutta. He is an adjunct professor at Notre Dame Seminary with a curriculum vitae that could hold its own against any cleric in the country. Tens of thousands of priests, seminarians, and lay faithful have attended his missions—a mix of theological depth, catechetical and scriptural clarity, and old-south storytelling. His thick drawl is as unmistakable as James Carville’s—but its huskiness dies at the altar when he chants parts of the Mass in Latin, when he seems to have transmogrified into a classically-trained Palestrina cantor.

Shortly after earning a mechanical engineering degree from LSU, he felt the pull of God and entered the seminary. Few in Leonville were surprised. Catholicism was part of the air he breathed. On evenings in the 1960s and ’70s, if neighbors out for a walk listened to the breeze, they might have heard the low murmur of Hail Marys drifting through the bedroom window screen of Howard and Sarah Champagne, where each night their nine children prayed the Rosary beside walls that on summer nights seemed to sweat.

“Dad took a train to Kansas City for a Cursillo [retreat] in the early 1960s,” said Fr. Champagne. 

When he came home, he announced, “We are a family that prays the Rosary.” So we did. These years later, I don’t think he’s ever missed a day. …We were raised in the Catholic faith. And we were raised to be hard-working; we loaded trucks with produce at 5 a.m., headed off for school, came home and did our homework, and headed back out to the greenhouses and farm before nightfall.

Given Fr. Champagne’s tough upbringing—where Catholicism, hard work, study, and devotion to prayer were fused—it came as no surprise that after his ordination in 1994 he began to see beneath things. And that’s where he found the poor. Years later, he and the priests, seminarians, and nuns of the Community of Jesus Crucified have rooted themselves among them in St. Martinville, a rural town where nightly sounds often include domestic disputes, turmoil, and the occasional burst of gunfire. But for Fr. Champagne, the tiny village is the ideal bayou Calcutta—a hard-bitten place where its religious community can pour themselves out as Christ through instruction, mentoring, job training, financial assistance, catechesis, and whatever else might console or lift the poor.

Because Fr. Champagne has detached from the world and built his life on devoted prayer, daily adoration and Rosaries, and stiff penances and self-denials, he sees the poor with a clarity shaped by the Cross. To him, they are Christ Himself, starving for love in the same way Mother Teresa saw it. And so, each day, through his toil, sacrifices, and love for them, he and his community share their stigmata: they bear the same sweat, grime, and dust of the suffering poor. The “bayou blackjack” soaks down into their blue and white cassocks and often covers their bodies after long days.

“When I think of him, I think of how good God is,” said a man who has known him since before he entered seminary. 

It’s a mystery; when I’m in his presence, my heart wants to grow closer to God. He lives among people with many difficulties and challenges, so he has inherited many of those same issues. But he never talks about it because he’s so focused on Christ.

God is amazing with His designs. Here’s just a simple Cajun boy that God filled with grace upon grace. I believe there’s an army of souls in heaven who intercede for him, people no longer with us that he once got to and touched. But this is what God is able to do with a priest who sits consistently at His feet in adoration and listens for Him.