By Gretchen Keiser

St. Anthony’s Church in Blue Ridge, a converted carpentry and woodworking shop perched on a steep slope off the Appalachian Highway in mountainous north Georgia, is celebrating a new, firmer foothold in the archdiocese.

On June 13, the feast day of the Franciscan saint who is namesake of the parish, the community of 60 families – some charter members and others who joined in recent years – came together for a Mass and picnic to celebrate the naming of St. Anthony’s as a parish and the installation of the first pastor, Father Steve Yander.

The full house for a midday Mass on Friday, and the friendly buzz of conversation inside and outside the church as parishioners waited patiently for all the celebrants to gather, were signs of the "unique spirit” of the parish, Father Yander said.

Because St. Anthony’s people live in remote areas of the beautiful wooded region of the Chattahoochee National Forest, some coming to town only twice a week, “once for shopping, once for church, church really becomes a time for sharing, a time for catching up on news,” the pastor said.

About 95 percent of the parishioners are retired people, he said, but while that status allows them to gather for a daytime Mass and linger comfortably into the sunny afternoon, there’s also a lot of activity and an openness to change.

The mixed choir of men and women sang robustly for Mass, celebrated by Father Walter Foley, who is pastor of St. Joseph’s in Dalton, 52 miles across a mountain from St. Anthony’s, its former mission. As pastor of the mother parish, and as dean of the area, Father Foley led the proceedings, but was joined by other priests who are a part of the parish history, including Father John Kieran, Father John Henley and Father Jorge Christancho, who in the 1980s started a mission in nearby Ellijay 15 miles to the south from St. Anthony’s.

Three parishioners also carried the gifts to the altar in slow, liturgical procession during the Offertory while taped music expressed the giving of bread and wine and the deeper offering of oneself of the Church.

While the community, at 60 families, is not large in numbers and, admittedly, is not likely to experience tremendous growth in the predominantly quiet and undeveloped area, St. Anthony’s has benefited from the faithful commitment of its members over the years and from the gathered wisdom and experience of people who have known many seasons.

“I’m just so happy for today I don’t know what to do,” said Catherine Hampton, a charter member of the parish and a native of the region who became a Catholic in 1946 at the age of 26.

A founder of St. Catherine Laboure parish in Copperhill, Tennessee, just across the state line, which for a number of years provided priests to minister to Blue Ridge Catholics, Mrs. Hampton was one of those to support the establishment of a strong mission in north Georgia.

Seeing that mission, which began holding Mass in 1967 in a doctor’s office, finally become a parish last Friday. “I had a great feeling,” Mrs. Hampton said. “It was just wonderful. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened here.”

The mission was established in 1967 as an outreach of St. Joseph’s in Dalton while Father Denis Dullea was pastor there, and Mass was celebrated in a number of places, including the Methodist church, before settling into the wood-working shop given to the church from the estate of Anthony Tillman.

About 16 families, including John and Loneita Pinder, cleaned and cleared out the building with its pot bellied stove, “painted it, paneled it,” Mrs. Pinder recalled, and celebrated the first Mass “on Christmas Eve, 1976.” Father Hubert Wolf, S.T., who died in 1977, and Father Matthew Noonan, O.M.I., were two of the pastors of St. Catherine Laboure to minister to the Blue Ridge community until the staff at St. Joseph’s in Dalton was enlarged in 1980 and the parish could send a priest across Fort Mountain to live at the mission.

Father John Henley was the first to come and then, when he became pastor of St. Luke’s in Dahlonega in 1981, Father Jorge Christancho assumed the care of Hispanic Catholics in north Georgia and the mission in Blue Ridge.

Recalling those “happy memories” prior to Mass June 13, Father Christancho said, when he stopped in a local restaurant and saw, printed on the menu, the confident announcement that 90 percent of the people in the area were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Interpreting the message as a lack of awareness of and tolerance for religious and ethnic difference, Father Christancho sought to begin a mission in Ellijay. After being turned away from other churches, he was finally able to begin saying Mass in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Ellijay for eight families in October 1982. Moving to the Methodist Church in 1983, the Good Samaritan Catholic Mission is now housed in a downtown storefront, just off the square in Ellijay.

The growing community of 12 to 15 families in Good Samaritan mission is a sign of the health of the Blue Ridge Church and its ability to foster and sustain faith, members believe.

While much of that strength comes from the charter members, most of whom still live in the area and came to the Mass and picnic June 13, additional support is being added by new retirees coming to north Georgia from Florida and bringing with them their years of experience in the church.

Spalding Mills and Tony Seixas, both former parishioners of St. Michael the Archangel parish in Miami and St. Vincent de Paul leaders in the city for over 20 years, retired with their families to the Blue Ridge area in the late 1970s. Father Christancho called upon their experience in launching the Society in Blue Ridge and Ellijay and starting a community Food Bank, the first in the area, in the 1980s.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society reaches out almost entirely to “the unchurched or non-Catholics” in the area, Spalding Mills said, and works closely with the Community Action Agency and with other denominations, including the Baptist and Methodist churches, in sustaining the Food Bank and providing money for rent, utilities and clothing to those in need.

St. Anthony’s parish is “very much like a family, very much,” Mills said as he stood in the bright sunshine while a line of people waiting for the outdoor buffet snaked under a covered porch and up the driveway between the church and the rectory. But, he added, Catholics are also “very active around the community,” serving the Chamber of Commerce, working with the mentally retarded and helping in other ways.

Last Labor Day a community-wide celebration and dinner, which served 1,200 in Blue Ridge, called upon the talents of St. Anthony’s for entertainment and led to the creation of the Blue Ridge Sympathy Band, a collection of singers playing homemade kitchen instruments and singing “old-time songs, with some mime, some horsing around, really entertaining the town,” Father Yander said.

The Band has quickly become a Blue Ridge fixture and is now being asked to do solo concerts, Father Yander said. Describing his parishioners, he said, “one of their outstanding characteristics is they know how to have fun.” But the exuberance comes, he said, out of a fullness of experience. “They enjoy life because they’ve know the pain of life too.” Most have grown children who are not living nearby, he said, and five families have shared the sorrow of burying adult children.

The balance of continuity and change seemed to permeate the day. At the Mass celebrating the new parish, the community was able to read, name by name, the founders who had helped build the parish, but have since died. Yet, Father Yander said, when he first arrived in 1984, the first item pressed upon him by parishioners was the need for a new church to replace the simple, renovated structure which has served since Christmas 1976. The parish is searching for a possible site for a new church, he said.

In his homily, Father Foley said, “Now the child can stand up, it has grown up. Now you’ve become an example to this whole community. You now become missionaries.”

With the strength of the parish and the gifts of Father Yander, he said, “between the two of you, you ought to be able to do what Anthony did – to share the gift of God with the community around you.”