Print Issue: July 4, 2002

Cheatham Hodges Retires As Georgia's First Catholic Conference Representative

By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer

ATLANTA - After 27 years walking the halls of the state Capitol on behalf of the Georgia Catholic Conference, Cheatham Hodges Jr. retired June 30.

With an eye to his health in 1997, after he had heart bypass surgery for the second time, Hodges said the Catholic bishops of Savannah and Atlanta brought in Alpharetta attorney and mediator Francis J. (Frank) Mulcahy to work with him. Mulcahy has now been elected by the bishops to succeed Hodges as executive director of the Georgia Catholic Conference.

Hodges' tenure began in 1974 as state Catholic conferences were first created in the United States following Vatican II. Their purpose is to convey to government officials the church perspective on the moral and ethical implications of public policy on topics such as abortion, the death penalty, child welfare, health care, education, immigrants and other issues. With the breadth of church social teaching, and its view of the common good, much legislation and public policy can be informed and shaped by it, if a Catholic presence is in the halls of the legislature.

People have not always understood what is involved in his work, said Hodges, a delicate role he characterizes as availability to legislators, on the one hand, and articulating the concerns of the Catholic Church as given by the two Georgia bishops, on the other.

"The Catholic Church has been very, very graciously endowed by the concept of a Catholic conference throughout the world. We always have to remember we represent the Catholic Church through our bishops, and only through our bishops," he said. He doesn't believe he should represent the viewpoints of individuals or groups, or his own viewpoint.

Archbishop Thomas A. Donnellan of Atlanta, one of the two bishops who elected him in 1974, told him, and he never forgot, "Remember - you are us - the bishop of Savannah and the bishop of Atlanta."

Hodges said that he encountered little hostility to the Catholic Church over the years and a great deal of openness.

"I always made sure I was there, I was present. And then I made sure I was patient," he said. "Sometimes you waited hours just to talk to somebody. I walked the halls everywhere. It gave me a presence."

"I'm a floor worker. I'm a night worker. I never left the Capitol before they did. I never turned down the opportunity to be with them at meetings, at dinners, at receptions. You had to be present, but you had to remember who you were," he said.

"There was always a willingness on the part of the legislators to learn . . . When you're there, you make it known you are the church. Then they turn to you, they turn to you as a counselor, they turn to you as a friend. Sometimes they turn to you in dismay."

"The legislators never really saw me as doing anything other than promoting the common good. I was there to look after the common good of the Catholic Church, the common good of the Catholic people and the common good of the people of Georgia."

When he first started working, Georgia legislators didn't have individual offices and met in the chambers. "Now every legislator has an office, a secretary and a clerk. It is a world of difference."

He said he was instructed to work with the legislature in a reactive way, understanding what legislators were facing while he was communicating church concerns and following legislation that was of interest to the dioceses.

Hodges said, for example, that in the first eight years he was there, 17 times "someone proposed a piece of legislation written in such a way as to actually prescribe a point of death for the sick and the elderly."

"I would study it, present it to the bishops and get their reaction. Every piece was defeated except one and the one that wasn't defeated was the one where they came to me and (suggested) why don't we work with them . . . to really specify what you, on behalf of the church, are trying to accomplish to not do harm to someone in their terminal days."

"We got it down to so fine-tuned a piece of legislation that our bishops could see it as not harmful to a person approaching death. It was passed by both houses and signed by the governor."

While abortion and end-of-life issues tend to be the high-profile issues, the "life and death issues," he said there are many issues in between that the church is concerned with, from tax-related questions to assistance to children.

Across the spectrum of issues "the church's influence is overwhelming," Hodges said.

The legendary speaker Tom Murphy he found to be "an intellectually honest man" who "never turned away from me when I asked to go to see him personally," although he tried to reserve those conversations to an essential few per session.

Something of a self-made man, Hodges was born in Savannah, the son of Cheatham and Marie Smith Hodges. Raised in the Cathedral parish, he was educated by Marist brothers in elementary school, but he left Savannah high school after a year and a half to go to work in the electrical trade. Entrance into the Navy in 1942 proved to be the gateway to greater opportunities and to a realization of the new chance that he was being given. He was trained as a hospital corpsman, given educational opportunities and sent to the Pacific, where he acquired a lifelong trait of being an independent worker. He read medical books extensively while on board ship, was recommended for college when he left the service, studied at Armstrong Junior College and then graduated from the Citadel, and briefly studied in the seminary and at the University of Georgia law school. His peripatetic career included working for Dupont, teaching in Florida Catholic and public schools, where he earned a master's degree in special education, and involvement in schools for troubled children in Pennsylvania, and in low-income subsidized housing in Georgia. He was working in Augusta when he was approached about becoming the first lay secretary of the Georgia Catholic Conference.

After being elected to the position, he "always had spiritual directors," the late Msgr. John McDonough in Atlanta and the late Msgr. Felix Donnelly in Savannah, "both very wise men."

He and his wife, Joan, have eight children and 12 grandchildren. A daughter, Mary Squires, is the representative from Norcross and is campaigning for a new Senate seat in that area, he said proudly.

He has been given the papal honor of Knight of St. Gregory by the bishops of Atlanta and Savannah and he and his wife also are Knight Commander and Lady Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. They live in Clearwater, Fla.

"Just say I was a servant," Hodges said. "That was the honor given to the Catholic conference when the bishops told me I worked for them."