Fr John Allen Green OFM: How a big boss became a simple Franciscan

Spiritual writer Fr John Allen Green OFM was once a successful business tycoon. But he left all that behind and became a Franciscan priest in search of silence and solitude, as he told Daluxolo Moloantoa.

At the age of 40 in the early 1990s,  John Allen Green was diagnosed with cancer. From his second-floor hospital room he could look out over the tops of the trees to the beautiful blue sky beyond. “The sound of the rustling trees gave me some comfort. A quiet voice inserted into the silence, ‘Come, I will lead you back to my Son’,” he recalls. It was a key moment in a journey of faith that would culminate in the priesthood.

Franciscan Father John Allen Green is a familiar name to many readers of The Southern Cross’ website, where he has been writing his reflections on the Sunday Mass readings since 2016.

This ministry began out of a challenge posed to him by Professor Pierre Brooks of St Pius X parish in Waterkloof, Pretoria. “On one occasion, while they were busy debating a particular understanding of the Gospel passage, Prof Brooks challenged me to write up my reflections and issue them by email before the actual Sunday Mass. This would put us on an equal footing in our debate.” Out of this emerged a constantly growing mailing list, and eventually a blog and the weekly Southern Cross column. Fr Green’s weekly Gospel reflections are internationally read and are now prepared three weeks in advance to allow for translation….

Always walking with Jesus

Fr Green was born in 1952 in Bez Valley, Johannesburg, to parents of Portuguese and Irish descent. As a child, he attended church at Holy Angels parish in Bez Valley. “My earliest recollection as a Catholic was as a very young child falling in love with Jesus at the Exposition and Benediction that I attended with my grandmother each Wednesday evening. With Mario Lanza’s song ‘I’ll never walk alone again’, the promise of Jesus as constant companion touched my heart. At the age of 7, I promised Jesus that I would always walk with him,” he told The Southern Cross.

In 1969, after completing his matriculation at Marist Brothers College (now Sacred Heart College) in Johannesburg, he studied to become an accountant and went on to build a diversified group of companies under the umbrella of the Progress Group, whose products included weaponry.

When he could take time out from work, he made pilgrimages to Fatima, Lourdes, the Miraculous Medal chapel in Paris, Częstochowa in Poland, and the basilica of the Visitation of Our Lady in Hejnice in the Czech Republic.

A pilgrimage to Fatima in Portugal coincided with his fight with cancer. “At the chapel of the Apparitions, I knelt down in silence to pray. Time stopped for me at that moment. With the receding light I came back into awareness of the present moment; there was a feeling of a warm glow throughout my body, and I knew immediately that I had been healed. Back in South Africa, this was confirmed by the doctors. I had no trace of cancer remaining in my body,” Fr Green said.

In 1994 he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. “To walk in the footsteps of Jesus seemed appropriate for me at that stage of my life. I had discovered the priority of Jesus’ solitude and silence everywhere in the Gospels. It was in solitude and silence that Jesus dealt with painful emotions like grief, the constant demands of his ministry, and finally how he prepared for his own death on the cross.”

Travelling by road east of Jerusalem into the Judaean desert, he saw something glinting in the sun. Walking over to it, he bent down and picked it up. “It was a brass bullet 76mm cartridge case. I looked at its base. There it was, the year of its manufacturing, the batch number — and my own armaments company’s logo. I was reduced to utter disbelief,” he said.

“This was my Damascus moment, waking from a dream-state to recognise that I had been slumbering with a serpent coiled on my breast: terrible weapons of destruction spread across the world, greater profits always the goal… To see my actions in their true light against the goodness of God is the deepest sorrow. And once you see, you see it everywhere. My complicity in an oil spill, killing our oceans and sealife, the burning forests of the Amazon, the desperate refugees fleeing war and poverty — this is my guilt as it is also our guilt as a species.”

The Franciscan path

After his retirement, he worked with the late Fr James Fitzsimons SJ, who was also his spiritual director, in the writing, publication and distribution of the Jesuit publication The Sacred Heart Messenger. This was coupled to his work with the Knights of da Gama in their Right to Live Campaign, the Missionaries of Charity at a hospice, and the caring for street children with Secular Franciscan Order member Daisy Rocouste in Bertrams, Johannesburg.

In 1998, he attended an annual convention organised by the Franciscan Order in South Africa. “This was a get-together of the various groups following the Franciscan Charism. There was one person at the convention, Fr Robert Stewart OFM, whose presence captivated me, and would greatly influence me in the years ahead,” Fr Green recalled.

The call to solitude led Fr Green to move into a small cottage in the Swartkopps’ hills, above Eikenhof about 30km south of Johannesburg. After a few weeks, “I had gradually disengaged myself from all the frenzied activity of the previous five years that had followed my 20-year corporate path of money, prestige and power. The late Bishop Gerard Ndlovu became my monthly director and confessor,” he said. “Increasingly, I turned towards the Franciscan way.”

From 2004 to 2007 he lived in Britain at the Franciscan International Study Centre in Canterbury, earning an honours degree in theology through the University of Lampaster in Wales. After returning to South Africa, he undertook further postgraduate studies in Christian spiritualty and psychology at St Augustine College in Johannesburg while also teaching at the Franciscan seminary.

Fr Green was ordained in January 2010, and immediately assigned to a parish in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal. “Rebuilding the parish community was my top priority, and I fell into my earlier trap of busyness and frenzied activity. Many of the parish structures required reinvention and rebuilding. Each day was filled with meetings and every night of the week was taken up in teaching, adult catechetics, marriage preparation, financial administration as the bursar for the friary, various committees and a contemplative prayer group. I was also the chaplain to the local Knights of da Gama as well as being the regional chaplain for KwaZulu-Natal,” he said.

Because of his business experience, Bishop Graham Rose of Dundee requested Fr Green’s assistance on the board of the St Antonine’s Old Age Homes, which had been established in the mountainous rural area of Amakhazi to care for the elderly, abused and destitute. The load was further increased when he was requested to chair the board of the Duduza Care Centre, which was run from the Maria Ratschitz mission in Wasbank, started by the Franciscan Nardini Sisters in 1998.

From hospital to cottage

In September 2015, Fr Green suffered acute heart failure, aggravated by chronic obstruction pulmonary disease. He was transferred to a cardiac intensive care unit in Johannesburg, where he spent two weeks in the intensive care unit, followed by a further two weeks in the cardiac care unit.

“This period of total dependence on others became once more a teacher through which I could view and challenge my thought patterns in past events, and especially my role as parish priest and as a pastor. I’d fallen into the trap of the literal instruction of St Francis to hold back nothing of yourself for yourself,” he said.

In December of the same year, he began a period of recuperation and rest following his hospitalisation. To facilitate this period of recuperation, his brother had a wooden cabin erected in a corner in the gardens of his sister-in-law’s home, situated in Johannesburg and close to the various specialists who were treating Fr Green.

“I spent 15 months in Franciscan solitude in my ‘Little Portion Hermitage’ in Johannesburg. My desire has always been to live this life of Franciscan solitude, shared with two or three other Brothers. This is in accordance with St Francis’ unique vision for solitude lived in fraternitas. Having two or three other friars alternating as Martha and Mary would allow for extended periods of silence. It flows from this silence that I find I am enabled to listen and to hear and to be truly present to others; striving always to become the Christ reflection of joy, peace and love,” Fr Green said.

With the permission of his order, Fr Green is living the Franciscan life and prayer in solitude, in his small hermitage cottage in the corner of the family garden.

“Each one of us is called to make that journey to the centre of our being, finding that core of the divine within us that resonates with the divine beyond space and time,” Fr Green noted. “Touching the eternal transcendent, we come face-to-face with Truth that dissolves our illusions of who we are. This is the sacred space of encounter with Jesus who is the Way, the Life and the Truth.”

Read Fr John Allen Green’s reflections on the Sunday Mass readings every week at www.scross.co.za/author/fr-john-allen-green-ofm/