By Rita McInerney

Parishioners of the new Catholic Church of Douglasville may or may not celebrate midnight Mass at Christmas in their temporary place of worship. But they are encouraged this Advent season that their long wait for a parish is coming to an end.

On the first Sunday of Advent, Dec. 1, they will worship together as a parish in the chapel of the Whitley-Garner Funeral Home at 7034 W. Broad St., Douglasville. This will be the first Sunday Mass for the Catholic Church of Douglasville since Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan established the parish on Aug. 8 of this year and named Father Edward O’Connor first pastor.

The chapel is being made available, Father O’Connor said, by State Sen. Wayne Garner. Mass will be celebrated there until the end of January when Father O’Connor expects the new parish will move into a facility at Spring and James streets now occupied by the Harvester Presbyterian Church. When Harvester relocates to its new church the Catholics will move in and begin to structure their parish life around several weekend Masses. The space, the pastor said, will seat at most 150 people. There are two small nursery rooms as well.

For the core group of parishioners, it will be hard to break their ties with St. John Vianney in Lithia Springs, Cobb County. Eleanor Brown has been a parishioner since 1967. For most of those years she had three children to drive back and forth to CCD and Masses. Transportation, Mrs. Brown said, has been the “biggest problem.” It’s the same for Dick and Diane Vots who live about 10 miles from Lithia Springs. With their involvement there “were many times when we spent every night over at the church,” he said. “We have a lot of friends there,” she said.

“Most people work in Atlanta, drive back and forth each day and then spend over 30 minutes driving to church,” Jim Krochmal said. He and his wife Brenda have been living in Douglasville since 1978 when the area, according to Jim, was a “cow pasture.” There has been a great deal of growth in the area especially in the last five years. There is “a predominance of young families looking to get as much house as they can for the price,” Ray Lavoi, property man for the archdiocese, said.

In the fall of 1984, according to Krochmal, a group of parishioners of St. John Vianney living in the western part of Douglasville wrote a letter to Archbishop Thomas Donnellan asking for his consideration of a parish in their section of the county. They knew that the archdiocese had purchased, in 1972, 10 acres of land about a mile south of interstate 20 on Prestley Mill Road. After an acknowledgement of their letter by the chancery, the group, early in 1985, began working on a petition to be circulated. Using a county map and the directory of St. John Vianney parishioners, they set about trying to find out how many Catholics were living in the western section of Douglas County.

A wonderful thing happened when they began collecting signatures on the petition. Diane Vots related, “We discovered a lot of people who weren’t registered at St. John’s. A lot of people couldn’t get it together because of young children. The blessing of the petition was that we discovered we are serving the needs of people we didn’t know about. It was really exciting.” People, she said, were so glad to see them, welcomed them eagerly.

“They wanted to know when it was going to start,” Dick Vots said. So already evangelization has begun in the new parish.

About 12 people took the petition around on a spring weekend and obtained more than 300 signatures. The petition had a cover letter in which the reasons for seeking a new parish were mentioned; the expected growth of the county with a current population of 65,000 and the need to be served and to serve a faith community in the area.

The chancery began an evaluation after the petition was presented in the spring. At St. John Vianney, a survey was made in June to which about 400 of the 650-700 parishioners responded. As a result of the petition, evaluation and survey the new parish was established on Aug. 8 by Archbishop Donellan.

Boundaries are: North - The Paulding County line east to Burnt Hickory Road; East _ Burnt Hickory Road to Fairburn Road (Highway 92) to the Chattahoochee River; South - The Fulton County line; West - The Carroll County line.

While most of the parishioners are expected to come from St. John Vianney, Father O’Connor also believes it will draw Catholics living in the Carrollton, Dallas, Fairburn, Villa Rica and Winston areas.

Father O’Connor with the assistance of Lavoie, found a rectory on Elizabeth Road in Douglasville and moved in Oct. 8. It’s about one mile from the property owned by the diocese. Father O’Connor, formerly pastor of St. Michael’s in Gainesville, is finding his small band of parishioners helpful in every way. Eleanor Brown has coordinated the crews who clean the rectory; furniture, kitchen equipment and utensils and many other necessities of housekeeping have been donated. One skilled parishioner has tailored handsome curtains for the windows.

Recently the pastor began saying Mass three times a week in the large room which appears to have been converted from a double carport to a family recreation room by previous owners. His altar, a butcher block table, is covered with a long Irish linen tablecloth given to him by his late mother. The candlesticks and cruets are Wexford and Blarney crystal and the crucifix is Georgia hardwood. On the wall behind the altar is a color picture of Pope John Paul II.

Meetings are held about once a month. Last week, after 7 o’clock evening Mass and after the coffee and rich Irish fruitcake had been offered by the pastor, a few of the parishioners sat with him around the dining room table and talked about the first Sunday Mass, and other plans for the new parish.

Mass is the center of the new life, Father O’Connor said. Other things will follow, he said, mentioning that he is eager to begin RCIA and Scripture study. Those in the religious education program at St. John’s will complete the study there.

“We were very conscious of the breakaway. We want to make it a non-break away, we want to keep close ties,” he emphasized.

“We’re not leaving holes in the community,” Diane Vots said. People from other sections are becoming involved in St. John parish action to fill the void made by the Douglasville area people, Jim Krochmal added.

For Father O’Connor it’s the first founding pastor assignment in his 25 years as a priest. The Roscommon, Ireland, native known around the archdiocese for his delightful humor, is already cranking out a weekly parish bulletin from his office in the new rectory. The Nov. 17 edition spoke of Mass:

“Any one Mass time is sure to be inconvenient for some people. At the same time, it will be an advantage to us as a “beginning” parish to have all members worship together. Each of us will get to know (or at least see) the entire parish community right away. As you may know, the funeral home chapel is quite large and I am most grateful to Mr. Garner for making it available to us. I am looking forward to our first Sunday Mass. In the years to come, when Douglasville has become the biggest parish in the western hemisphere, people will look back and say ‘It all came alive right there in the funeral home.’”