BY GRETCHEN KEISER

Staff Writer

ATLANTA--The Marist order will give pastoral care of the Parish of St. Joseph in Marietta to the Archdiocese of Atlanta in June.

The decision was announced to the 1850-family parish by the Marists during the second week in January. Marists have served the Marietta area for almost 100 years and have had a resident pastor at St. Joseph's for over 40 years.

After sending Marist priests to Cobb County as a mission territory for five decades, a resident priest was assigned to St. Joseph's Parish in 1952.

St. Joseph's is the mother parish in Cobb County, from which the present day large Catholic parishes in the county were formed. Some of the parishes formed from St. Joseph's were Holy Family in Marietta, St. John Vianney in Lithia Springs and St. Thomas the Apostle in Smyrna, according to Marist Father Lawrence Schmuhl. A parish history written in 1977 by Mary E. Martin also lists Transfiguration Parish in Marietta as being formed from St. Joseph's.

The Marist order will celebrate 100 years of service in North Georgia in 1997.

The provincial of the Washington Province of the Marist order, Father William Rowland, SM, approached Archbishop John F. Donoghue in September 1995 about the archdiocese assuming care of St. Joseph's Parish sometime in 1996.

Father Rowland said that the religious order did not have enough priests to continue to staff the parish and requested that archdiocesan priests assume the pastoral care.

Marists will remain at St. Joseph's for the next six months and will use this as an opportunity to prepare a transition for diocesan priests and as an occasion to recall and celebrate the history of the parish, according to the order.

"I encourage you to take this occasion to celebrate all that has transpired during the time we have been associated with you," Father Rowland said in a letter to St. Joseph's Parish.

St. Joseph's parishioners received a letter from the pastor Father William Seli, SM, in January and the parish change was also the subject of his homilies on Sunday, Jan. 14.

"As you know, such a decision was not made lightly on our part," Father Rowland's letter to the parish said.

"It became apparent to me as provincial that we could no longer provide sufficient personnel to staff St. Joseph Parish. That is the primary reason for my approaching Archbishop Donoghue in September 1995 and requesting that we be allowed to return the parish to the pastoral care of the Archdiocese."

"I want to thank the archbishop for his sympathetic understanding of our situation and for his willingness to work with us to accommodate my request," Father Rowland wrote.

The provincial said the order departs from Marietta with mixed emotions, "sorrow that comes from saying 'goodbye' to so many fine people, along with satisfaction that comes from realizing the tremendous growth and development that have occurred since our coming here in 1907."

The Marist presence in North Georgia began in 1897, according to the parish history, when the bishop of Savannah assigned the mission territory of North Georgia to the order. By 1902 the order was visiting Marietta monthly to celebrate Mass and other sacraments, the history states. In 1907 the order received permission to establish a mission church in Marietta which became St. Joseph's Mission.

Prior to the current pastor, St. Joseph's was served by the late Father Bob Baker, SM, under whose leadership the parish built a new church sanctuary dedicated in 1991. The parish also has a Catholic school with 490 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

From the perspective of the Archdiocese of Atlanta, the departure of the Marist order from St. Joseph's Parish "is a stretch (of priest personnel) that we hadn't anticipated," said Msgr. Edward J. Dillon, vicar general.

While "it is going to work okay in the sense that we have the manpower to do it," Msgr. Dillon said, the transfer may impact other plans of the archdiocese. For example, he said, it may delay one or more of the new missions that the archdiocese had planned to open in 1996 in response to continued rapid growth in the Catholic population. The archdiocese had also hoped to reach a point in 1996 of having one or two spare priests available to help as needed in case of a priest's illness, the vicar general said.

Eleven new priests will be ordained for the Archdiocese of Atlanta in 1996 and eight are scheduled to be ordained in 1997, according to Msgr. Don Kenny, vocations director of the archdiocese.

"Although this sort of change is difficult for the parish and unwelcome from our perspective," Msgr. Dillon said he was grateful that the archdiocese could respond positively to the Marists' request because the archdiocesan vocations program has been so strong in recent years.