By Rita McInerney

A quarter century of service to the people of God is being celebrated by Father Paul Fogarty, pastor of Holy Family parish in Marietta.

Sunday, June 14, he was honored at a parish celebration following a noon anniversary liturgy. In a few weeks he will celebrate this milestone with his family and friends in his native Ireland.

Father Fogarty is “very happy” at the large Marietta parish he serves as third pastor. Founding pastor in 1973 was Father John V. Mulroy who died of cancer in 1982. He was followed by Father Richard Kieran who was succeeded by Father Fogarty in 1983.

Priests and laity who know him tend to describe him in repetitive language. They call him firm but loving, a prayerful man who teaches by example, a person willing to take on humble tasks with his parishioners.

Mrs. Edward (Joan) Lucas, a founding member of Holy Family, met Father Fogarty in Kroger recently and told him she was going to get her camera to take his picture. “I want Ed to see my pastor doing his shopping,” she said.

This fits her view of the priest as one “who takes everything in stride, and isn’t for grandiose things.” After parish socials he will take a sweeper and help with clean-up and never omits going into the kitchen to thank those responsible for the event, she mentions.

The parish under Father Fogarty is a good training ground for young priests, who believes. “He is very fatherly and priestly while letting them be a little independent.”

Father John Farrelly, pastor of Sacred Heart, Milledgeville, and parochial vicar at Holy Family for about two-and-a-half years, found Father Fogarty a pastor who creates community. “He makes the rectory a home.”

He has a gift for encouraging young priests to use their own abilities, Father Farrelly says. “He doesn’t sit you down and tell you what to do.” He also “teaches by example” and is a “prayerful man who does what he believes is right. He doesn’t give in to pressure groups.”

For Father Farrelly, who recognizes his own need to have “someone to look to for guidance,” the years with Father Fogarty in Marietta were happy ones.

Father Dan Stack, who served four years with Father Fogarty at Holy Family, says “we could disagree and still be friends…work together and still have fun.”

Father Stack, now pastor at St. Bernadette’s, Cedartown, says Father Fogarty has “a real clear agenda,” there is “no duplicity” about him.

Jane Kreinast, his secretary at Holy Family, says “his office is always open” and he always has time for people who need him. Working with him, she has found that “his heart and his mouth are together.”

Bob Schellman, a parishioner of 15 years, takes a heavy burden off Father Fogarty as volunteer administrative assistant. He keeps parish buildings and grounds in good working order and has been doing so since Father Mulroy’s time. Schellman says all Father Fogarty asks for is results and calls him a “very easy man to work for.”

Like others, he says the pastor wants to “pitch in” when he can, “but his time is pretty well taken up with pastoring.”

Father Fogarty ministers to an active congregation of 1,900 families with the assistance of a staff of 12 paid employees and uncounted dedicated parishioners. There are 850 children enrolled in religious education classes, and outreach to the needy and poor of Cobb County is mostly through the parish St. Vincent de Paul Society. There are groups for senior citizens and young singles. Three years ago, a Knights of Columbus council was begun. Currently the Women’s Group is being reorganized.

Up to 400 Hispanic Catholics from all over the county celebrate Mass in Spanish at Holy Family each Sunday at 1:30 p.m.

Any loneliness for home and family Father Fogarty might feel is eased by his participation in the “Tuesday group.” Here, a number of Irish priests meet to enjoy each other’s company and conversation laced with wit. Golf and tennis are their games with Father Fogarty in the racquet set.

A Dubliner who has known him for nine years, Gerard O’Connor, administrative assistant to Archbishop James P. Lyke, OFM, also enjoys playing tennis with him, although the priest “beats me every time,” he says. O’Connor sees in his older friend a “fine example of the priesthood,” a spiritual man who is “very unassuming.”

The east Cob parish of Holy Family was the second pastorate for Father Fogarty. In 1974, seven years after arriving in Atlanta, he was given a big challenge. He was sent to Conyers to start a new parish, St. Pius X, for a small group of families then worshiping in a chapel on the grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.

Soon the congregation outgrew this worship place and moved tot he Harry White Funeral Home run by Waldo and Evelyn Bowen in Conyers. The people celebrated Mass there until the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 1976, when they moved into their new church. The building was dedicated the following March.

“There was a wonderful feeling of support and interest in building a new church,” Father Fogarty says. “People volunteered to do everything. We wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.”

Margie Schaetzly, Father Fogarty’s secretary for the nine years he was pastor there, says he was “very well liked. He was firm but loving and deeply devoted to the Eucharist. He didn’t ask you to do any more than he asked of himself. We all shed a lot of tears when he left.”

In the early days she recalls, “Father Paul wasn’t a bit uneasy about putting on old clothes and digging.” He “pitched in,” and shoveled and raked with parishioners to prepare the grounds for shrubs and trees.

On a personal level, she has been deeply touched by his compassion. When her husband Joe died, their pastor cut short a vacation in Ireland to come back and celebrate his funeral Mass. He was a support to the family through “thick and thin.”

Bonnie Sullivan was the first person to be received as a Catholic in the new St. Pius X Church in Conyers. It was Father Fogarty’s ministry in the parish that convinced her to join, she says. That and the way her husband, Mike, lived his faith and “never pushed” her to convert.

Both the Sullivans view their friend and former pastor as a man of great integrity, loyalty and compassion. “He would have been a success in any career,” if he hadn’t had a vocation to the priesthood, they are convinced.

Before Father Fogarty accepted the challenge of building a parish in Conyers he served as assistant at St. Jude’s in Sandy Springs with Monsignor Donald Kiernan as pastor. This was 1972, a time of astonishing growth at St. Jude’s. There was among the newcomers, Father Fogarty recalls, a “need to be involved,” a realization that the church “needed them and they needed the church.”

From 1970 until 1972, Father Fogarty assisted Father Edward O’Connor at St. Mary’s in Rome. Father O’Connor, now pastor at Holy Trinity parish in Peachtree City, terms him “a good priest to work with. We had a good time together.”

Immaculate Heart of Mary parish on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta was his first assignment on arriving in Atlanta in 1967. He found his introduction to being a priest in a strange land eased by the gentleness and kindness of his first pastor, Monsignor Michael Regan, and “very family oriented” parishioners full of a wonderful spirit for their church.

Father Fogarty entered St. Patrick’s Seminary in Carlow at the time when Monsignor P.J. O’Connor was “recruiting very strongly in Ireland” for the mission diocese of Atlanta.

Someone at home, he recalls, put him in touch with the recruiting monsignor. He was accepted for this diocese and came here after his ordination at St. Patrick’s on June 10, 1967. Classmates Edward Dillon, now vicar general for the archdiocese, and Peter Ludden, who served as chancellor and was named a monsignor shortly before his death in 1989, were ordained with him.

The newly ordained Father Fogarty celebrated his first Mass at his home parish, St. Mary’s in Knock a Drom, County Tipperary. One of five sons and three daughters of Johanna and Jeremiah Fogarty, both now deceased, he was raised on a farm in Knock a Drom. He attended the local school and went on to secondary school run by the Christian Brothers in Templemore.

It was in secondary school, the pastor recalls, that he began to feel he had a vocation. An older student, now a priest in Limerick, Ireland, was a role model and the principal, Brother Scully, supportive in his decision to enter seminary. His parents were happy about his vocation, but “never forced or pushed me into it,” he says. He never had doubts and has always been happy as a priest, Father Fogarty says.

Two other religious vocations, both with the Sisters of Mercy, blessed his family. Sister Josephine is a religious educator in parish in Waldorf, Md., and Sister Kathleen is principal of a grade school in Tullamore, Ireland.