Rev. John A. Cioppa to celebrate 60th anniversary

Rev. John A. Cioppa, M.M., of Green Island will celebrate his 60th anniversary of ordination as a Maryknoll missioner on Sunday, June 30, at the Maryknoll Society Center in Ossining.  

After ordination on June 13, 1959, Fr. Cioppa was assigned to Hong Kong where he taught high school and did parish and relief work at the Bishop Ford Center until 1963. He then opened the Bishop Primary School, serving 2,000 local children. 

Returning to the U.S. in 1965, Fr. Cioppa did pastoral work in Chicago’s Chinatown. Reassigned to Hong Kong, he served as pastor of St. John’s Parish in Kwun Tong and worked on plans for a pastoral center and boys’ high school, which opened in 1972. He was then elected Maryknoll’s Regional Superior of Hong Kong, an office he held from 1973-1978. In 1978, he was granted a visa to China and was the first Maryknoll priest to re-enter China since the 1949 Communist takeover. 

Fr. Cioppa returned again to the U.S. and was elected to Maryknoll’s General Council in 1978. During his six-year term from 1978 to 1984, he was liaison to the Maryknoll regions in Asia and helped the society reorganize its response to the newly opened China. 

“The work done in the early ’80s has led to Maryknollers teaching in China, working in AIDS education, caring for people with Hansen’s Disease, as well as researching and producing publications about that country,” said Fr. Cioppa, who considers that period the high point of his mission career. 

Fr. Cioppa served as a parish priest from 1987 to March of this year at St. Patrick’s Church, Kow­loon and was also projects director at Holy Spirit Study Center. 

 Fr. Cioppa was born on June 14, 1932, in Green Island where he attended Heatly Grammar School. He graduated from La Salle Institute in Troy in 1949.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Maryknoll College, Glen Ellyn, IL and a master’s degree in religious education from Maryknoll Seminary, Ossining.