GEORGIA, CATHOLIC CHURCH IN

Georgia was the southernmost of the 13 original English colonies in America, and was admitted to the Union as the fourth state in 1788. Its 58,876 square miles extend westward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Appalachian Mountains. The Archdiocese of atlanta covers the northern part of the state, at the end of the Appalachian chain. At the "fall line," where the rivers drop precipitously to the southern alluvial plain, the Diocese of savannah begins, taking in the "fall line" cities of Columbus, Macon and Augusta and everything to the south. If the Archdiocese of Atlanta is centripetal, focused on the city of Atlanta, the Diocese of Savannah is centrifugal, with no geographical center; the abovementioned cities plus Savannah itself, Brunswick, Valdosta and Albany form an irregular outer circle ringing a rural interior.

The history of the Church in Georgia begins in the 16th century when the Spanish were in control of the region, but when it fell under the rule of the British early in the 18th century, Catholics were not welcome. It was only after the American Revolution that the Church structures began to take shape and parish life began to flourish.

Spanish Control. Catholic Spain sought to spread its civil and religious influence beyond its lucrative colonies in Central and South America into North America. During the 16th and 17th centuries, what later became Georgia formed part of the Spanish province of La Florida. Franciscan friars on Hernando de Soto's expedition performed the first baptisms of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, near what is now Macon, in 1540. Father Pedro Martínez, S.J., became the first "Georgia martyr" when natives killed him on Cumberland Island in 1566. Other Jesuits followed Martínez to work among the Guale, a strong tribe with a vibrant culture whose predominance in the region led the Spanish to call the whole coastal area "Guale." Various Franciscan friars succeeded the Jesuits. In 1587, Father Pedro de Corpa, O.F.M., founded a mission dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe near present-day Darien, and Franciscan Father Blas de Rodríguez established another in honor of Saint Clare ten miles further north. Their efforts led to the conversion of more than 1,500 Guale. In 1595, three more missions were founded on the Golden Isles. These missions were not only religious centers, but were Christian towns where the inhabitants' physical as well as spiritual needs were met. But language barriers and the lack of necessities often caused tensions, as did Catholic moral teaching, when it ran counter to human failings or tribal customs. In 1597, when Juanillo, the heir apparent to the cacique or chief of Guale, relapsed into polygamy, a long-held native custom, Fathers de Corpa and de Rodríguez reminded him that Christian doctrine required monogamy. Refusing to give up his additional wife, Juanillo systematically planned the slaughter of the missionaries,

all but one of whom were killed in mid-September 1597. On Jekyll Island, Father Francisco de Avila was held captive and enslaved for nine months before he was rescued by Spanish forces from Saint Augustine. (Nearly 300 years later, Savannah Bishop Raymond W. Lessard opened the official cause for the beatification of the Georgia Martyrs on Feb. 22, 1984.)

After the Juanillo revolt, the Spanish governor and his forces took revenge on the Guale and managed to "pacify" the area enough to allow the reestablishment of the missions. In 1606, Bishop Altamirano of Cuba visited the Florida missions to confirm converts and ordain priests. In Guale, he confirmed more than 1,000. In 1635, Fray Francisco de Ocana reported great numbers of Spanish and Guale coming to church because of miracles worked through the martyrs' relics.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) led to the destruction by British forces of all but one of the 14 Spanish missions in the Apalachee (northern Florida-southern Georgia) area. British settlers from South Carolina thereafter built forts in what was then Spanish territory, on the Savannah, Santee and Altamaha rivers, to protect themselves from the Spanish and their native allies.

British Rule. After the Anglo-Spanish war in 1727–28, General James Oglethorpe (1696–1785) founded the British Colony of Georgia in 1733—named after King George II—as a Utopian refuge for debtors, many of whom were Irish, and as a bastion of protection for the British colonies against the Spaniards in Florida. Although not himself anti-Catholic (indeed, there is some evidence that he may have been baptized a Catholic in infancy), Oglethorpe adhered to British law and prejudice: his colony's charter outlawed the Catholic Church along with rum, slaves and lawyers. Georgia intended as a refuge for poor "persecuted Protestant sects" as well as for "the unfortunate but worthy indigent classes." Austrian Lutherans, known as "Salzburgers," and Jews were among those welcome in the colony. Catholics were not. Oglethorpe brought Anglican chaplains to his colony, including some of the leading evangelists of the day, John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield. A Spanish attack on Saint Simons was repulsed by Oglethorpe's forces at the Battle of the Bloody Marsh (1742). The Spanish threat to British domination of the area was effectively ended.

The idealistic provisions of the charter stood in the way of economic growth, and in 1751 the colony passed to the crown, which allowed the institution of slavery. Although Catholicism remained outlawed in Georgia until the American Revolution, a few Catholics seem to have resided in Savannah from time to time. Some 400 French Catholic "Acadians" ("Cajuns") landed there after they were expelled from their homes in Nova Scotia by the British government in 1755, on the eve of the French and Indian War. At first they were only given permission to stay the winter. Many were then separated from their children and sent inland, while their children were distributed among Protestant families to be raised as Protestants.

U.S. Statehood. During the American Revolution, the British occupied Savannah, a hotbed of revolutionary discontent, from 1778 until 1782. Catholics on the whole distinguished themselves in the revolutionary armies, in supply and in Congress. The vital alliance of the colonies with Catholic France under Louis XVI and eventually with Catholic Spain helped dampen anti-Catholic feeling in the new United States. More than 600 Catholic French and Haitians died alongside Irish and American soldiers trying to wrest control of the city of Savannah from loyalist forces in 1779. The Catholic heritage of the Marquis de la Fayette and of Count Casimir Pulaski, who died in the Battle of Savannah, enhanced the reputation of their co-religionists. Georgia's first state constitution (1777) granted religious toleration to its citizens, but had no effect in Savannah while it remained under British control from 1778–1782. Dissenting Protestants and even Jews were tolerated in British-controlled areas, provided they paid tithes in support of the Anglican Church, but Catholics remained officially proscribed. By the time of Georgia's second constitution (1789), the Revolution was over, the British were gone and the last official discrimination against Catholics—a religious test required of office holders that obliged them to deny the key Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—had been abolished. But as the plantation system prevailed, most of the arable land ended up in the hands of Protestant landowners, who in turn determined the religion of their dependents. In effect, Catholics could practice their faith only in towns and in small settlements of their own.

English-speaking Catholics from Maryland founded the first Catholic congregation in Georgia at Locust Grove about 1793 even though there was no resident priest. They built the first Catholic church in Georgia, dedicated to the Purification of Mary. Not long after the Marylanders arrived, a group of French Catholics, fleeing the insurrection of slaves in Santo Domingo, moved into the area with their priest, Father Souze, about whom little is known. Around 1793–94 another French priest, Father Jean (John) le Moyne, settled in the community as its first "parish priest," although nothing is known about his appointment. He, too, had fled to San Domingo and then to Georgia. From Locust Grove, he traveled to Augusta and Savannah, ministering to the Catholics in both towns, and dying in Savannah in 1794.

Other Catholics soon arrived from Ireland, after Theobald Wolfe Tone's abortive revolt against British rule (1798), and from Germany, after the Napoleonic invasion and the ensuing secularization of Church lands (1803). Around 1820, a larger group of Irish settlers, leaving the deprivations of their native land, arrived at Locust Grove. The Irish remained in the area.

At first, one priest was responsible for all Georgia. Baltimore Bishop John Carroll authorized Father Olivier le Mercier, who also came via Santo Domingo, to exercise his priestly ministry in Savannah in 1796. Father le Mercier came to be known as the "Missionary of Georgia." By November 1796 he had settled in Locust Grove, with Savannah, Augusta, and the Golden Isles as missions. But in May 1798, Father le Mercier made the parish of Saint John the Baptist in Savannah his headquarters. The little congregation grew through the addition of immigrants and on May 30, 1799, the Mayor and Aldermen of Savannah passed a resolution reserving half a trust lot for its use. When the state of Georgia incorporated a church, it did so in the name of lay leaders, and not in the name of the pastor, giving the lay trustees legal control. This situation was not unique to Georgia, and the trustee quarrels in Georgia were minor compared to those elsewhere.

When in 1803, Father le Mercier was named pastor of the troubled Saint Mary's Church in Charleston, the Reverend Antoine (Anthony) Carles replaced him in Savannah as "Rector and Priest" for over 16 years.

A petition for an extra lot in 1811 highlighted the parish's growth "owing to continued emigrations from Europe and the West Indies, settling on these shores to escape death and persecution." Augusta received a pastor in about 1810, when Augustinian Father Robert Browne arrived in Georgia's "Second City."

In 1820, the Holy See established the Diocese of Charleston, comprising both Carolinas and Georgia. the Reverend John England, of Cork, Ireland, became its first bishop. The presence of a bishop in the vicinity, rather than in far-off Baltimore, was of great benefit to the Catholics of Georgia. The financial support of prosperous Irish immigrants such as Dominick O'Byrne of County Mayo, who came to Savannah in 1820 and made a fortune in the lumber business, was also vital to sustaining the Catholic faith in a largely Protestant area. When he died in 1850, O'Byrne reputedly left his wife the richest widow in the South.

The growth of public works in Georgia in the 1820s, '30s and '40s brought large numbers of less prosperous Irish settlers. Arriving to work on canals and railroads, those who survived the dangerous work usually settled in the worst housing in the most unsanitary parts of Georgia's towns. The terrible living conditions of the majority of Georgia's Irish also concerned the state's priests. When Father Jeremiah O'Neill, Sr., for example, brought the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy, many of whom were Irish, from Charleston to Savannah in 1845, he intended for them to meet the educational needs of his rapidly growing congregation. In 1835 Bishop England laid the cornerstone of a new Church of Saint John the Baptist in Savannah. On April 1, 1839, Bishop England dedicated the new brick edifice capable of seating 1,000 people. The parish at that time included about one-third of the Catholics in Georgia.

On July 19, 1850, Pope Pius IX erected the Diocese of Savannah, as the seventh provincial Council of Baltimore had requested in May 1849. At its creation, the diocese included all of Georgia and most of Florida, with a total Catholic population of 5,500, with parishes in Savannah, Locust Grove, Atlanta, Augusta, Macon and Columbus. Father Francis X. Gartland, a native of Dublin, Ireland, and vicar general of the Diocese of Philadelphia, was appointed to the new see on July 23, 1850.

In 1937 the name of the see was changed to Savannah-Atlanta, and in 1956 Atlanta was designated a separate diocese. About that time Bishop Hyland in a public statement said, "The Catholic Chruch has always, and will always, condemn racism in all its various shapes and forms." In 1961 he, along with the bishops of Savannah and Charleston, issued a pastoral letter announcing their intention to integrate the Catholic schools within a year. In 1962 Atlanta was raised to the dignity of a metropolitan archdiocese, with Savannah, Charlotte, Raleigh and Charleston as suffragan sees. The provincial bishops meet twice yearly and the priests are invited to an annual gathering, as are various diocesan officials.

The population of Georgia in 2000 was about 7,500,000, of whom only 397,000 (5.3%) were Catholic (320,000 out of 5,000,000 or 6.4% in the Archdiocese of Atlanta and 77,000 out of 2,500,000 or 3% in the Diocese of Savannah). Both Catholic dioceses, Atlanta and Savannah, belonged to the Georgia Christian Council, an ecumenical conference of the judicatory heads of and other delegates from the ecclesial communions in the state.

Bibliography: j. t. lanning, The Spanish Missions of Georgia (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1935). r. m. miller and j. l. wakelyn, eds., Catholics in the Old South (Macon, 1983). m. v. gannon, Rebel Bishop: The Life and Era of Agustine Verot. (Milwaukee, 1964).

[d. k. clark]