By Steve Lindsey

Fr. Frank Brouchard was preparing his breakfast in a recently purchased house that now serves a the rectory for St. Francis of Assisi in Cartersville. Fr. John Calhoun, having just finished Mass at the first mission and headed for the second. Their week was just beginning.

From a Sunday morning outlook, it would be a typical week. But typical in the instance of Cartersville’s LaSallette Fathers means diverse and, geographically, well-spread.

The LaSallette Fathers call Boonville, Conn., home. When asked how they managed to locate in Cartersville, Fr. Brouchard explained that the LaSallettes were for work in the South. The Archdiocese of Atlanta wanted them because Cartersville needed them. Until their coming in 1968, Cartersville had been a mission of Cedartown. But the parishioners of St. Francis needed more than just the Sunday services of a priest. The solution they sought came when the LaSallettes agreed to send Fr. Joe Loftus and Fr. Peter McKeown to Cartersvile.

Under the leadership of Frs. Loftus and McKeown, Cartersville took the assignment of mission churches in Canton and Calhoun and the three started to move at a new pace. In 1970, Fr. Brouchard replaced Fr. McKeown. A few months ago, Fr. Rohrman took over for Fr. Loftus who had taken ill. But the changes have not slowed the pace in Cartersville.

Activities at St. Francis vary from an ecumenical clothes closet in Cartersville, to interfaith discussion groups at Calhoun’s Reinhardt College; from the men’s formation of the Catholic Allatoona Lake Club for improving the archdiocese’s land on the lake, to the teen-agers’ plans to arrange entertainment outings for the patients at Cartersville’s Springdale Nursing Home.

Cartersville has come a long way from the days when Mass was said above a local pharmacy, and there is no slowdown in sight.