By Gretchen Keiser

Wearing a hard hat with a cross on the front, Father Mario DiLella picked his way across a construction site bustling with workers and sloppy with red Georgia clay soaked by four days’ rain.

The striking three level building is clearly rising and a homemade sign proudly proclaims, “New Catholic Center” for Georgia Tech, “coming this summer!’

Working his way in to where the front entrance on Fourth Street will be, “Father Mario,” as he is known at Tech, pointed out a sweeping area where Masses will be held. Open through two stories, the chapel will seat 300 and its 20-foot ceiling will create a church-like atmosphere. On the same level will be a separate conference room, a Blessed Sacrament chapel, a kitchen and a TV lounge room. On a lower level there will be a recreation area and rooms for a live-in Tech student who will exchange maintenance work for room and board. On a top level, Father Mario will have his own quarters with bedrooms, kitchens and living area. There will be a roof deck and a courtyard accessible for parties and Bible study classes, for a large Mass celebration or a sit-sown dinner for students and parents.

This will be so different from the way campus ministry has been for him that Father Mario says, after 15 years at Tech, he believes he is beginning an entirely new ministry.

“I have no idea what that ministry will be like,” he said later, attempting to describe the great change in circumstances that the new Catholic Center will bring about, “But I imagine it will be just revolutionary.”

Until now the trim, energetic priest, who is a Franciscan, has been part of what he describes as a “peripatetic church” at Tech, moving on Saturdays and Sundays to various locations big enough to hold Mass, but is still used to celebrate daily Mass for students.

On the weekends, Father Mario totes his Mass kit in one of two bags, using a baggage cart, either to the Presbyterian Center or the Student Center Theater for his Masses. Sometimes, he said, he might have posters under one arm to advertise retreats or other activities, or an armful of special tee-shirts. Social activities, like the parties held every school quarter at the Catholic Center, are “elbow to elbow” in the little house, he said. Daily Mass, which draws 25 to 30 students, can still be held at the house, but Masses on holy days and during Holy Week attract too many and must be moved to the Sunday locations. Events at the Catholic Center over the years “got so crowded that we saw our crowds diminish,” Father Mario said. “It was too crowded” and some students got discouraged and stopped coming.

It was this phenomenon, along with more research, that persuaded archdiocesan officials to approve the building of a new Catholic Center at Tech and to make the project one of four major programs to be funded by a special $7.2 million Capital Funds Drive. The new Catholic Center at Georgia Tech will cost more than $1 million, and is scheduled to be completed this summer. A formal dedication Mass has been set for October 20, a fall Sunday when students will be back in full numbers.

Part of the research that led to the new Catholic Center revealed that 20 percent of the Tech student body is Catholic, some 2,000 students out of 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students, more than any other single denomination. Before now, Catholics also had the smallest center on campus. Father Mario said the building size may have limited the number of activities possible, but at least it was a strong witness against the allegation the Catholic Church has infinitely great wealth stashed away.

He hopes that the new Center will double the number of students coming to Sunday Mass on campus. Right now, he said, over 400 are coming to weekend Masses, but some are leaving campus and going to church at various Atlanta parishes because they miss the church atmosphere. The new setting, with its soaring ceiling, will also have a crucifix with a figure of the Risen Christ on it and statues of Mary and St. Joseph the Worker. Around the periphery of the area will be spelled out: “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice.”

The building is designed by two Georgia Tech professors, Rufus R. Hughes, II and Dale Durfee, and its construction has become a lesson for architecture students who are taking notes as it rises. As Father Mario gave a visitor a tour of the site, a student stopped to note the progress. “It’s coming, Father. It’s coming.” The campus newspaper just finished an article on the new center.

The Catholic Center seems to have become a visible sign of the committed relationship which Father Mario has had with Georgia Tech and its students for the past 15 years, and which he hopes will continue for many years into the future.

Unlike a typical parish where the people stay and the pastor is reassigned, Georgia Tech has a constantly changing population and a pastor who stays. “Every quarter 300 to 400 different students come and 300 to 400 leave,” he observed. “Nobody has that except in a college situation. Every four years I have an entirely new parish.” In the midst of that change, and for a group of students who are in a time of their lives when very little seem to be stable, Father Mario is one constant. Ordained 32 years ago this June, he worked as a parish priest in Thomasville and Moultrie, Georgia and spent five years in active duty as an Air Force chaplain before being assigned by the Franciscans to the campus ministry at Tech. The youthful looking, 58 year-old priest is unabashed about wanting to stay at Tech “another 30 to 40 years.”

“I love the ministry here,” he said. “I don’t want to do anything else except my campus ministry.”

On the mantle in the old Catholic Center is a plaque with a photo of the 1985 ACC championship Tech basketball team thanking Father Mario for his support. In 1984, he was given the first award by the Graduate Students Senate, to be given annually in the honor of an outstanding staff member. This year he was inducted into a national honorary society for his leadership activities at Georgia Tech at a ceremony conducted by the Tech president.

The obvious warmth is there, but Father Mario also said his student parish needs a strong challenge to be Christian. He attempts to balance that demand with the need to lovingly support the students.

“I tell them, ‘I’m your priest, I’m not your pal,’” he said. “I don’t believe in coddling them. I try to bring them out and help them to grow.”

Tech, he said, is a community of traditional young people, 18 to 22 years old, who are scientifically and technically minded, gifted, highly disciplined and under a great deal of pressure to do well academically. Because of the academic demands, students are generally too busy to develop some of the problems with drugs and alcohol that hit other campuses, he said. But, he said, they need to be drawn out of themselves and into a commitment with others. “They have tunnel vision,” Father Mario said. “I tell them, ‘You need to come to my theology class. Jesus himself said you must go out to other people. You have to make yourself available to other people.’”

This emphasis has led to students getting involved as volunteers at night shelters, at St. Francis Table -- the soup kitchen at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception -- Big Brother/Big Sister programs, and scouting work. There are four different folk groups who play at each of the four weekend Masses, and 28 additional ministers involved in weekend liturgies as greeters, lectors and ministers of the Eucharist. In deference to Tech students’ schedules and the need for punctuality, Father Mario religiously keeps his daily Mass to under 20 minutes, assuring them, “If you’ve got a class, if you’ve got a lab, you’re gone by 10 minutes to six.” But despite the brevity, he reminds them that “the source of our life is the Eucharist out of which our entire life revolves.”

He knows the students need to be pushed to see beyond the walls of Tech classrooms, but Father Mario also described the students’ need for affirmation and love. “I spend hours on the telephone talking to kids” about school pressure, parental expectations and some “boy-girl, girl-boy problems,” Father Mario said. “They feel a lot of pressures, tremendous pressures we can’t imagine.”

In liturgies and conversation, Father Mario said, he tells the students, “You are worth something. God loves you.” Without that knowledge, he noted, a mediocre grade or a difficult quarter can lead a student to depression and serious problems. Recently, he said, a group of young men from one fraternity called him late at night and brought over a female student who had attempted suicide. Sometimes, he noted, students need support to take time off from school.

“I try to be very close to my students. I tell them I love them,” Father Mario said. If they need to leave for a quarter, he will support them. When students are going home for the summer, he said, “I tell them, ‘Thank your parents for sending you to me. Tell your folks if the world is in your hands -- and it is -- we’re in good hands.’”

It is out of this love for the young people in his parish that Father Mario exudes enthusiasm for the new Catholic Center. Talking about his “new” ministry he envisions simple but significant changes, like the ability to distribute Communion under both species and to wear his full Franciscan habit, now that they have a permanent home. He also expects to be able to host Bible study classes, “movie nights” for students to come by and “just relax” and watch a film on a video cassette recorder, and times for parents to be invited for a meal and “to see what their students are doing.”

He also noted that the students and Georgia Tech community are raising $75,000 to furnish the new center, attempting to answer, in some measure, the generosity of those who supported the Capital Funds Drive. Father Mario said that he would extend an invitation to the October 20 dedication to every parish in the archdiocese, so people can see their joy and enthusiasm.

“A lot of people in that drive gave specifically to Tech,” he said. “We want them to know without them we wouldn’t be.”