Maggie Johnston: Quietly Making A Difference Behind the Scenes

Maggie Johnston is one of the most familiar faces at St. Augustine’s Seminary – at least to those who have passed through its doors over the last three and a half decades.

Maggie runs the kitchen at St. Augustine’s. She and her team serve three meals a day to the Seminarians, faculty and staff and handle all meals for various functions held at the Seminary. Her official title is Service Manager, but she could just as easily be called ‘Mama Maggie’ for her motherly care of those she “happily serves” on a daily basis.

“I love to come to work,” she says. “It’s a real family atmosphere. I like seeing the Seminarians. They’re all like my sons and I care for them the same as my own son.”

That means if a particular seminarian has a favourite meal, “well, I try to fill it.”

It’s something she has been doing for 36 years, since she answered a job ad in the newspaper in 1985 for a cook at the Seminary. She now has a staff of eight, including, she adds with pride, “very well-trained chefs.”

“It is a real family atmosphere. And we (in the kitchen) are all treated with so much respect.”

Her menu is fittingly dominated by homestyle meals. Among the favourites from the seminarians over the years, she says, are spaghetti and meatballs, steak, shepherd's pie, beef stroganoff and stuffed chicken.

One of her favourite events to prepare a meal for is the Alumni dinner, where “you see faces that you watched during formation, and now they’re priests.”

It’s like a homecoming and ‘Mama Maggie’ loves it.