“Gainesville had few Catholics before 1900.”
Those are the opening words of St. Michael Catholic Church’s self-described history on its website.
But that is no longer the case as the demographics of Hall County and the surrounding area have significantly changed during the past half-century.
According to one website that uses U.S. Census Department data to profile areas of the state, Catholics are now the second largest group of those identifying themselves as religious in Hall County, trailing only Baptist as church of preference.
“In the early 1900s,” St. Michael Business Manager Deacon Ken Lampert said in a recent interview, “at that time there were only about a dozen or so Catholics in Gainesville, and there was a priest over in Athens, and he used to come over once a month to Gainesville in a horse and buggy and spend the night and celebrate Mass.”
Lampert says one historic Gainesville family helped facilitate those monthly visits. “General James Longstreet and his wife, Helen Dortch Longstreet… were Catholics…and they set up a chapel in the basement of their house right there on Green Street.”
“Then it was around 1933 when we built our first Catholic church here in Gainesville, and it still stands today,” Lampert said. “It’s right across from the south entrance of the hospital right there on Spring Street and it’s made out of Stone Mountain granite.”
That structure and the people who worshipped there officially became a parish on December 19, 1942. “We were a mission church in 1933 of St. Josephs over in Athens. There was no Archdiocese of Atlanta at that time; we were under the Archdiocese of Savannah at that time.”
But the face of Gainesville would begin to change around the time of World War II as growth of a new local industry would bring to the area an increasing number of Roman Catholics.
“Due to the poultry industry (it) was bringing more and more people to our area. And then…due to the continued growth of the parish…in 1974 we built the church that we are still in today,” Lampert said of the church’s current campus on Pearce Circle off South Enota Drive.
Lampert has served at St. Michael for over twenty years and has seen the Archdiocese of Atlanta - to which St. Michael now belongs - grow to over one-million members. “St. Michael today is a really mixed culture. I’m from New Orleans originally so I’d refer to it as ‘gumbo’; we’re just like a big melting pot here of our cultures.”
“On weekends we have eight Masses now…we have Masses in English, masses in Spanish, we have a Mass in Vietnamese, so it’s a very vibrant church of about a thousand families.”
To accommodate the rapidly growing number of Catholics and ease the crowding conditions at the parish church, a mission church, St. John Paull II, was opened that now meets just off Browns Bridge Road, on South Smith Road, midway between Memorial Park and Mc Ever Roads.
“It’s mostly a Latino community but it also has its own English-speaking congregation, too. It’s a growing church in its own right,” Lampert explained.
As to what might lie ahead for the growing congregations at both locations: “I think our main goal for the future is just trying to reach out to the community’” Lampert says. “There are a lot of people that are hurting out there…and we want them to meet Christ, to meet the living Jesus, and know that you are loved.”
To learn more about St. Michael Roman Catholic Church call (770) 534-3338 or visit their website by clicking here.
