Smelling like the sheep is Bishop-elect Tran's shepherding style

No tale of the tape could have predicted this.

John Tomba, a member of the pastoral council at Mary Queen of Peace Parish in Mandeville and the grand knight of Knights of Columbus Council 12072, is 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds.

Bishop-elect John Tran, the pastor of Mary Queen of Peace who will become an auxiliary bishop of Atlanta on Jan. 23, is about “5-foot-nothing” and tips the scales at approximately one-third of Tomba’s weight.

“We call each other ‘twins,’” Tomba said, laughing at a transformed life and a relationship he never could have dreamed of 18 years ago when Katrina and other events nearly swallowed him whole.

There was a time when Tomba wondered how exactly he fit into the Catholic Church.

His marriage of 21 years had ended in divorce, and he remarried, but he and his new wife Donna then lost everything in Katrina. The Metairie home they had purchased in April 2005 somehow never had the flood insurance premiums directed through the proper channels.

An insurance failure

“We lost everything we owned,” Tomba recalled. “We had about 3 1/2 feet of water, but we ended up not having flood insurance because the documents didn’t get submitted by the insurance agent. We were bust.”

That wasn’t all. Tomba and his wife had a young son Jacob, and Tomba was searching for a way back to the church. Tomba went to a priest and basically put all his life’s cards on the table.

“It was at that point I was trying to get my life straight, and the priest told me there was no place in the church for us,” Tomba said. “God, in his infinite wisdom – and in the way he moves us around like chess pieces – we lose everything in Katrina and we end up on the northshore and I end up at this amazing place, Mary Queen of Peace.”

The Tombas’ new community welcomed them, and Jacob was baptized.

“I still was on the fringe,” Tomba recalled. “I really wasn’t involved until Father John came around.”

Father John arrived in Mandeville as pastor in 2014, and as Tomba tries to make sense of it all, he distills it to one theme: His “twin brother” brought him back.

“In the last eight years, I’ve changed my whole life and the way I dedicate myself to the church and the church community,” Tomba said. “Maybe I’m going overboard now, but I love the guy. I love the guy.”

A giant of a priest

When Tomba thinks about the personification of spiritual excellence – bringing Christ to others – he looks up. The picture that comes to mind is his pastor, Father Tran, scaling a 12-foot ladder, clambering onto a roof with a chainsaw to cut down a tree after another hurricane in LaPlace or Beaumont, Texas.

“I’m no wordsmith, but Father John has been an incredible asset to me in my journey of faith,” Tomba said. “His humility and his dedication to service really helped change my entire outlook on life. I was telling some friends of mine the other day, ‘I’m going to miss him.’ I’ve never been friends with a priest in my life. I always thought priests weren’t like normal people, that they were unapproachable. It’s going to be a big hole in my life.”

Tomba grew accustomed to seeing Father Tran cutting the grass, pulling weeds and manning the leaf-blower on the parish grounds – doing anything that needed to be done.

In 2020, just at the beginning of the pandemic, Father Tran got a call from a friend or a family member. A big storm had blown through Marrero, and an elderly Vietnamese man had a massive tree pushed onto the roof of his trailer.

As usual, Tomba and several knights joined Father Tran in the mercy mission, which went badly wrong. After Father Tran climbed the ladder and started cutting, a large branch shifted and knocked him off the ladder, sending him 13 feet to the ground.

Tomba saw it all in slow motion.

“It was pretty harrowing,” he said. “He was injured pretty severely. The fact that he had already donated one of his kidneys (in 2015), he didn’t need any trauma to his internal organs. He was busted up, and his liver was damaged. He cracked ribs. He was in bad shape for awhile.”

A moment of prayer

Tomba left the hospital briefly to retrieve Father Tran’s wallet from his truck, but he had to sneak back in during the COVID lockdowns to get back to his floor. The hospital was so crowded Father Tran was on a gurney in the hallway, waiting to be transported to a trauma center in New Orleans.

“I asked, ‘Before you take him, can I just say a little prayer for Father John?’” Tomba recalled. “All these medical professionals stopped what they were doing, and I prayed and they prayed with me for Father John. It was amazing. I get welled up thinking about it.”

Tomba and several parishioners are part of the Mary Queen of Peace post-hurricane SWAT team, ready on a moment’s notice to provide food, supplies, chainsaws and sweat.

It is exactly the kind of hands-on work that once brought a marginalized “twin” back to the church.

“I don’t want to speak out of turn, but some of the priests I’ve encountered and dealt with are like kings of the castle,” Tomba said. “They may have councils of people to give recommendations, but it’s really their way or the highway. Father John is the opposite. He has let us take on initiatives. He takes advice and really lets us advise him. That’s what really got me locked in. My goal now is to be a total servant leader in everything I do.”

Tomba has one piece of advice for Atlanta’s Catholics: Hide the ladders.

“I don’t think they’re going to let him drive a truck,” Tomba said. “They’re going to buy him some little car. It’s going to change his whole life.”

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