Once a Ram, Always a Ram: Father Joseph LaJoie’s Journey From CSU Student to CSU Pastor
- Guest Contributor
- 35 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Sarah Mendus
Across the street from Colorado State University in Fort Collins sits St. John XXIII Parish, the beloved home of RamCatholic and its many CSU student members. Since 2022, the community has been shepherded by Father Joseph LaJoie, a pastor known for his classic rock references and his “CSU Dad” sweatshirt — but his connection to the campus began long before his assignment.
Twenty years before becoming pastor, he was a CSU student. When he began his freshman year in 2000, he had no idea he would one day be a priest. He had thought about it briefly after Confirmation and occasionally during high school.
“Especially in 11th grade,” Father LaJoie noted, “when they’re really pushing college on you and introducing to you discernment of what you’re going to do when you graduate, the idea of the priesthood came to my mind really for the first time.”
Still, he didn’t entertain the idea for long.
“I could list all of the reasons anyone would be hesitant to become a priest,” Father LaJoie remembered. “I wanted to get married and have kids. I wanted to find what my station in life was going to be, a career. I wanted to be successful, make good money.”
After five semesters at CSU, he still hadn’t declared a major. Nothing really called to him. The idea of priesthood gently returned, but again he rebuffed it. He was determined to pursue the life he wanted. One night, frustrated, Father LaJoie sat down with the CSU course catalog, determined to choose something.
He apathetically settled on accounting. He thought, “I’m good with math, and accountants probably make good money, so I’ll just go with that.” Soon after, he transferred to CU Denver so he could live at home while finishing his degree.
But as he approached graduation, Father LaJoie found that he still wasn’t happy.
“I would’ve been a good accountant if I would’ve cared about it,” he said. “My heart wasn’t in it, but I was trying to force it to be because I still wanted those other things.”
But 2005 changed that. At the start of the year, Father LaJoie’s aunt passed away at forty-two, and just a few months later, Pope John Paul II died.
“Both of those events united really forced me to think, what am I doing? I’m twenty-two. I picked a major, thought I found a direction, but I just was not happy.”
It was something of a “quarter-life crisis” for him, waking him up and rattling what had been an unshakable vision of his future.
It was then that the call to the priesthood resurfaced. This time, despite his fears and reservations, he listened.
“The night Pope Benedict XVI was elected, I finally sent my first email to the Archdiocese, saying I don’t know what to do or who to talk to, but I might need to talk to someone about becoming a priest,” Father LaJoie recalled.
He found out about a retreat happening in February for those considering the priesthood. Father LaJoie called two days before the retreat to see if there was space, crossing his fingers that they would say it was too late. Instead, a cheerful woman named Mary told him that, of course, he could come.
He went, reluctantly. Much was unfamiliar — especially nocturnal adoration.
“I didn’t really know what adoration was,” Father LaJoie admitted. “I didn’t know how to pray.”
He signed up for 3:30 a.m., and despite being alone in the room, he still felt a presence.
“It was a sense of ‘someone’s in here.’ It wasn’t because they made a noise; there was just a disturbance in the force,” Father LaJoie remembered.
Kneeling in front of the monstrance, he made an interior prayer: if God wanted him to continue discerning, he needed to give a sign by the end of the weekend.
“That’s when I, for the first time, heard the voice of Jesus in prayer,” Father LaJoie recalled. “What I heard was ‘You keep looking for a direction, why do you keep running?’ Oh boy.”
When he returned home, he told his parents, “I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I’m going to have to go into seminary at some point to figure this out.”
He began attending Mass, praying the Rosary, and going to adoration daily. His parents encouraged him to finish college — he was one year away and would be the first in the family to earn a degree — but he knew seminary couldn’t wait.
“That’s where I’m supposed to be,” Father LaJoie remembered feeling. “This is IT, this is what I was waiting to feel when I was trying to figure out what to do for a major.”
He picked up the application in May, finished it in three and a half weeks, and entered seminary that fall. He was ordained in 2013.
Years later, while serving as pastor of Sacred Heart in Greeley, he received a call telling him that Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila had asked for him by name to serve as pastor of St. John XXIII — the campus ministry parish serving CSU.
“I was just stunned that I was getting this assignment. A lot of us saw it as, in some ways, the most important assignment in the archdiocese,” Father LaJoie said, noting the importance of college ministry and the number of vocations that had come out of RamCatholic. “It’s still to this day the flagship campus ministry location in Colorado.”
He felt the weight of it — and nerves about returning to Fort Collins. Twenty years had passed since he was a student at CSU, so he had few sentimental ties, but he remembered being unhappy there. He wasn’t sure what it would be like going back as pastor.
What Father LaJoie found was an abundance of support from the phenomenal staff at St. John XXIII and the FOCUS missionaries assigned there. Though the transition was rocky, he quickly found it to be a community and assignment that he truly loved.
There was a very clear full-circle moment.
“I was a very unhappy and lost young man living up in Parmalee Hall, not knowing what to do with my life,” Father LaJoie said. “Now I’m across the street from the place where I was running away from God, thinking there’s no way you can give me the things that I want in life, there’s no way you can satisfy the desires that I have by becoming a priest. After having accepted my priestly vocation, it’s very clear that this is what I was meant to do all along.”
Returning when he did also brought a new dimension of growth to his priesthood. When his parents first dropped him off at CSU, they were thirty-nine, and when he began his assignment, he was forty.
“These students are young enough to be my actual children,” he said. “Growing into the term father, being much more chronologically accurate than it has up until this point before, is a very beautiful and humbling thing.”
From the outset, Father LaJoie’s goal has been to refocus St. John XXIII on its mission as a campus ministry parish.
“A lot of people across the street are very lost and have never been told about God or Jesus,” he said. “We’re here not to be a temple against the wokeness and political correctness of the world; we’re here to save people from this toxic stew of immorality that we live in. We’re here not to condemn them all to Hell but that we might save them.”
That mission — reaching students with the Gospel — remains the heart of RamCatholic. And who better to lead them than a fellow Ram?
