39.0°,
Fair A priest, and a St. John’s University professor
‘Involving the lay people in spreading the word of God’
It was 9:05 a.m. on the first Friday back from a month-long winter break, and 24 pharmacy students at St. John’s University, in Queens, were getting an introduction to their new class, Interpersonal Communications for Pharma.
“We are going to look at communications as it affects our interactions and responses with clients in our career as pharmacists,” said their professor, who added that he would have the students’ names memorized after two weeks of class. “This class will examine the way language wraps together a speaker’s meanings and intentions with others.”
Was that really the Rev. Chux Okochi — a priest from Our Lady of Lourdes church in Malverne — teaching a graduate class at St. John’s?
Back in 2003, the thought of a priest teaching communications was unusual even for those at the university, Okochi recalled. “I came to St. John’s in 2003, and told them I wanted to teach communications classes, and they said to me, ‘You’re a priest and you want to teach communications? Maybe theology instead, no?’” Okochi recalled.
“But I have my Ph.D. in communications,” Okochi responded — not just a masters in theology.
“And I’ve been teaching at St. John’s ever since,” he told the Herald. “Public speaking is my main area of concentration.”
Okochi, who will turn 55 in March, said that the reason everyone is surprised to hear he is a professor is because he is simply busy doing his thing. “Nobody knows the things I do, and I think it’s partly my fault,” he said, adding that he leaves the Our Lady of Lourdes rectory at 6:30 a.m. most days, and doesn’t return until 9 or 10 p.m. “The priests in my house say to me, ‘You really live here?’ because they don’t really see me much.”
Okochi is a familiar face, nonetheless, to those who attend his mass each Sunday at 5 p.m., when he combines his speaking skills with the warmth of a wide smile. “I did my dissertation, my research, in how to involve the lay people in spreading the word of God,” he said Okochi. “That’s what I did — how do you pass on the message, how do you communicate it?”
Ordained in Nigeria in 1988, Okochi came to the U.S. in 1997, planning to study here. He received his theology degree at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and returned to Nigeria, but didn’t stay long. Looking for “something to do,” he said, he decided to return to pursue a doctorate in rhetoric and communications. He was drawn to studying communications at Duquesne, he said, because of the university’s strong offerings in phenomenology, the philosophical study of how humans experience being in the world.
After finishing his coursework at Duquesne, Okochi moved out of Pittsburgh and settled in Elmont for two years before ultimately moving to Malverne and becoming a priest in residence at Our Lady of Lourdes in 2004.
And as if being a priest and a professor wasn’t enough, he is also the director of pastoral care services at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, where he oversees daily administrative affairs, supervises chaplains and assists the administration in helping the hospital run smoothly.
“My goal in Calvary Hospital is to provide care and services to meet the patients’ and families’ comfort, dignity, psychological, emotional, and spiritual end-of-life needs,” he wrote in his biography. “Care is increasingly becoming technical and less human in character.”
