By Gretchen Keiser

“This is magnificent,” said Eugene Lorenz, looking over the site where three or four shovelsful of dirt had been turned over moments before.

In 1952, he had been a student at Georgia Tech and a Newman Center president when the decision was made to purchase the first place on the Tech campus for Catholics. Then, 100, perhaps 150 Catholic students gathered at the campus center and had a Mass on campus once a year – for Mother’s Day.

Now, there are 2,000 Catholic students on Tech’s campus – 20 percent of the student body of some 10,000 and the largest single denomination on campus. They have been crowding for weekday Mass into the small bungalow on Fifth Street, and moving for Saturday evening and Sunday Mass from the Presbyterian Center to the Student Center Theater.

Sunday afternoon, March 11, after a Mass for several hundred students at the Theater, Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan blessed the site at Fourth Street and Brittain Drive, N.W. for the new Georgia Tech Catholic Student Center.

The new Center will have a chapel with a seating capacity of 300 for Mass, a recreational area for social events, and an apartment for Franciscan chaplain, Father Mario DiLella.

Father DiLella said he can finally look forward to unpacking his bags in one place, some four years after the campus community wrote its first “letter of need,” formally asking the archdiocese for funds and permission to build a new center.

The site was obtained in a swap with Georgia Tech for the present campus center on Fifth Street. The money was obtained through the recent $7.2 million capital funds drive conducted in the archdiocese; this is one of four projects made possible by the drive.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for – for years and years,” said Father DiLella, beaming, as he was embraced by students who witnessed the groundbreaking. “We’re thrilled.”