BY RITA MCINERNEY

Fifty years a priest in Georgia, Father Walter J. Donovan has significant stories to add to the institutional memory of the Catholic Church here.

Ordained July 1, 1944, at St. Bernard’s Seminary in Rochester, N.Y., he chose the priesthood and a mission area because one priest asked him the question.

The questioner was Msgr. Patrick J. O’Connor, famed in archdiocesan memory for recruiting priests and collecting funds for the mission church in Georgia.

“He asked me if I had ever thought of becoming a priest, as he did so many others,” Father Donovan remembers well. The monsignor admitted that no one had ever asked him through all his school years taught by priests.

Father Donovan first met the Georgia native at Catholic University. “He was a very happy priest, anxious to share the priesthood. He was really convinced he was doing good” in his constant efforts for the small numbers of Catholics in Georgia.

The younger man was 24, graduated from Catholic University when he answered the question by entering St. Bernard’s, a seminary no longer in existence.

After his ordination, Father Donovan came South to Savannah where he was assigned to the Cathedral of St. John. From there he was sent to Blessed Sacrament Parish in the same city and then to Immaculate Conception in Dublin as pastor.

His first assignment in Atlanta (made a separate diocese in 1956) was as pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in Athens. After 13 busy years there, he was named founding pastor of Most Blessed Sacrament in southwest Atlanta. He remained there 11 years and in 1971 became pastor of St. Thomas More in Decatur.

(Msgr. O’Connor lived in retirement at St. Thomas More while Father Donovan was pastor. The older priest had spent five years helping a priest friend at his parish in Freeport, Bahamas, after retiring from his archdiocesan labors. He died Aug. 1, 1980, at 78.)

In 1981, Father Donovan became pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Cumming. When diabetes began to affect his eyesight, he retired in 1988 and came to live at Sacred Heart Church in downtown Atlanta.

Today, at 78, he wears special glasses that are strong enough for reading newspapers, but he’s not allowed to drive. He enjoys the people and environment at Sacred Heart and is thankful he can celebrate weekday Mass.

But the past as he lived it and was told about it, is clear to him. And he’s willing to share his lore, sometimes a bit indefinite about the years but always kind in mentioning individuals. His conversation is direct, unclouded by hyperbole.

When he became aware that black people felt unwelcome in the Catholic churches of Georgia he tried to ease this bias whenever he found it.

While serving as pastor in Dublin in the late 1940s he came to know a young black man from one of the Caribbean islands who attended Sunday Mass. “I tried to get him to bring his friends. He came all the time but couldn’t convince them. I was trying to let them know they were welcome.”

In the 1950s, at St. Joseph’s in Athens, when a black parishioner, war veteran and “fine gentleman,” died, his wife refused to have him buried from St. Joseph’s. She claimed their relatives and friends wouldn’t come.

Father Donovan was stumped as to what he could do until a young black woman, new to the parish, told him there was something he could do.

“You can go to his funeral.”

Father Donovan attended and was one of several clergymen called on to eulogize the dead. The priest talked about the “fine Catholic” the parish had lost and told the mourners he was sorry the man wasn’t being buried from his own church.

In the early 1960s in Atlanta, he joined a few black and white Catholics in the St. Martin de Porres Inter-Racial Council. Member panels went out to parishes when invited and presented a program on how people can get along.

“It helped prepare Catholics for integration, although some were not enthusiastic,” Father Donovan said.

The Hawthorne Dominican sisters at the Cancer Home provided a room for the members to meet. “It was hard to find a meeting place.”

He served as chaplain for a couple of years. “It was good, created a climate (of understanding) for some people and broke ground for dialogue.”

Bishop Francis E. Hyland (1956-61) raised money and built a school for blacks. Drexel High School, at St. Paul of the Cross parish, while Father Donovan was pastor at Most Blessed Sacrament.

“He said he knew it wasn’t the best thing to do but the only thing that could be done” before school desegregation to give black teenagers and education, the jubilarian recalled.

“It annoyed him that there wouldn’t be any black children at the new St. Pius High School.”

Both in Dublin and Athens, Father Donovan’s parishes covered 10 counties and he traveled all around to say Mass for small groups of Catholics. The small numbers of the faithful had increased somewhat when Georgia soldiers brought Catholic war brides from Italy and England home with them.

Most Georgians didn’t know any Catholics, Father Donovan mentioned, “Although they might have encountered the ‘Irish travelers,’ (also known as tinkers) who have reportedly been around since Civil War days.”

There was a group of travelers in Athens, some living in trailers, others in tents.

“The ones I knew never got into trouble. They were originally mule traders. Later they specialized in floor covering, linoleum, they would buy as rejects from factories. Or they would spray barns, often times the whitewash would run off the barn with the first rain.”

The travelers he knew in Athens always came to Mass and had statues and holy water fonts in their trailers and tents.

He tells an interesting anecdote about another group, Italians in Elberton, a mission of St. Joseph’s for some time. Well before his time, in the late 1930s, he relates, an Italian stonecutter at a marble quarry, was injured on the job and died before the nearest priest in Athens could reach him.

His death prompted an Italian woman in Elberton to send a postcard written in Italian to the Vatican, telling of the death and the lack of a priest. The story reportedly came to the attention of the pope who passed it on to the apostolic delegate to the U.S. He in turn asked the bishop of Savannah, “What are you going to do for your people?”

Sometime later the small stone church of St. Mary was built, made possible, its cornerstone testifies, through an anonymous donor. In time, the Verona Fathers were sent to minister to Catholics in Elberton, Hartwell, Sharon and Washington.

During his long tenure in Athens, Father Donovan began directing the resettlement of people from central Europe, the Ukraine and Russia, displaced from their homes by World War II. The National Catholic Welfare Conference was a resettlement agency for the refugees.

One of the stipulations was that a job, usually on the farms, be waiting for them. Often, “by the time the family arrived, the farmer didn’t need them,” Father Donovan said.

It was fortunate he had a large rectory. “I always had a few rooms for them to stay in. The post-war economy was good. Most had no problem getting jobs.”

Some longtime priests in the archdiocese recall Father Donovan as conscientious about implementing Vatican II changes. He is candid in recalling those years, certainly not tumultuous at Most Blessed Sacrament.

“We didn’t have to dismantle in order to get things going as was the case in older, established parishes. It was a very young crowd of people. It was the 1960s, everybody was enthusiastic. We didn’t have anything. No church. Ultimately we had a combination building. For a couple of years we had Mass in a movie theater.”

One ecumenical gesture was appreciated. When the new school at Most Blessed Sacrament wasn’t ready for its opening day, a nearby Methodist church, Father Donovan said, “let us use their Sunday school rooms until the school was completed.”

Along with pastoring, Father Donovan filled other roles during his long ministry here. He was second president of Catholic Charities in the 1950s and first president of the Senate of Priests in the 1960s.

Father Donovan believes one explanation for the shortage of priests today is because of the “limited tenure” they serve in a parish. In his home parish, St. Mary’s in Little Falls, N.Y., the pastor he remembers with affection served his people there for 30 years.

“In the block I lived in there were seven vocations in 20 years. From the parish there was at least one every year or so.”

He was the sixth of seven children of John and Margaret Johnson Donovan. He has a sister, 89, living in Herkimer, and a brother, 76, in Gloversville, N.Y.

Sacred Heart Parish will honor the jubilarian with a Mass at 10 a.m. Sunday, June 5. A reception will follow in the parish center. Friends and former parishioners of Father Donovan are welcome.