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The Southern Cross
DIOCESE OF SAVANNAH NEWSPAPER
Vol.56 No. 29
Thursday, August 21,1975
Single Copy Price — 15 Cents
9
Bishops Learn Of Work And Land At Tidy Creek
GA. BULLETIN PHOTO
SAVANNAH’S BISHOP RAYMOND LESSARD chats with two
participants at the day long program at Tidy Creek where bishops mingled
informally with hundreds of people from all over the southeast.
BY JERRY FILTEAU
TIDY CREEK CAMPGROUNDS, Ga.
(NC) -- “Y’all come,” shouted Glenmary
Father John Barry, between guitar
strums, to the. people milling around a
huge revival tent set on a small hill by
Tidy Creek in Chattahoochee National
Forest.
And they came. Textile workers. Coal
miners. Farm Workers. Sugar Cane
pickers. Labor organizers. Mountain
farmers. Victims of strip mining.
Craftsmen and women. Catholics,
Presbyterians, Baptists, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, and the unchurched. And a
passel of Catholic bishops.
They came mostly from Georgia, but
also from West Virginia, Tennessee,
Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina,
Kentucky, Virginia.
They came for a crafts fair, a country
barbecue, a little country music and
gospel singing - but mostly to ask the
bishops to help them find justice.
Tidy Creek also drew media people
from as far away as New York and
Denver. It drew newspaper reporters,
who had to go four miles to the nearest
phone - hanging on a tree beside a
forest service lookout tower -- to call in
their stories. And it drew television
crews, including a CBS-News crew that
brought in its own electrical generator
so that it could get adequate lighting
and sound for a planned network
documentary on the event.
The event at Tidy Creek was the
second of three day-long hearings Aug.
7-9 on “Liberty and Justice for All.” It
was part of the U.S. Catholic observance
of the nation’s bicentennial, sponsored
by the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops (NCCB).
Led by Archbishop Peter L. Gerety
of Newark, N. J., chairman of the
justice subcommittee of the NCCB
Committee for the Bicentennial, the
bishops and their advisers listened
throughout the day to pleas for justice.
They heard Hubb Spires of South
Carolina, president of the Carolina
Brown Lung Association, explain
between coughs how 35 years of
breathing cotton dust in a textile mill
had earned him “brown lung” disease
and forced retirement at age 55 on eight
dollars a month pension. Spires and two
colleagues urged the bishops to support
efforts for better health conditions in
the mills and better wages for the
workers, who are among the lowest-paid
factory workers in the country.
The bishops heard Diana Lyons, a
former migrant farm worker and now
full-time union organizer in Florida for
the United Farm Workers of America,
ask why it is that migrant workers
“work 10 to 12 hours a day putting
food on other people’s tables, then
come home and can’t afford to put
enough food on the table for their own
families.”
A black Baptist lay deacon, Bill
Worthington, asked the bishops to
support strong health and safety
legislation for coal miners. Worthington,
who began organizing mine workers in
the 1930s in the legendary bastion of
anti-unionism, “Bloody” Harlan County
in Kentucky, told the bishops that
health and safety issues, particularly the
' 'moling black lung disease, are the
chief focus of mine worker unionizing
efforts today.
Gustav Rhodes, a sugar cane worker
and member of the Southern Mutual
Help Association, said that sugar
workers - politically powerless, frozen
into subsistence wages, forced into
substandard housing, and locked into
immobility by debt -- “have only one
hope, one hope that can’t be taken
away - and that’s the Church.”
J. W. and Kate Bradley from Petros,
*Tenn., told the bishops of their almost
single-handed efforts to slow down or
stop the strip-mining of coal in their
area. They described the poverty of the
people, the destruction of the land, the
waste of coal in strip mining.
Strip mining, they said, recovers only
30 percent of the coal in a vein, while
other methods in comparable coal fields
can result in 90 percent recovery, and
Bishop Raymond Lessard of
Savannah, Ga., intrigued by Ms. Lyons’
testimony that farmworkers and small
farmers should be united in a struggle
against large, corporate agribusiness,
said that his father in North Dakota had
been forced by economic factors to sell
the family farm to corporate farming
interests.
Another panelist, Father J. Bryan
Hehir, international affairs specialist for
the U.S. Catholic Conference, in
response to Spires’ testimony on textile
mill conditions, noted a personal tie of
sympathy with textile workers. Before
Additional Stories
On Page 2
employ many more people. “We should
have been a wealthy people when you
consider what has come out of our
land,” Mrs. Bradley said.
More than 20 of the 300 persons at
the hearing testified before the panel of
bishops and their advisers. Their
concerns were different, but yet the
same. Woven through the testimony was
a powerful sense of closeness to the
land, of familiarity with hard work,
poverty, and hardships, of
overwhelming powerlessness in the face
of big corporations and pro-business
politics - but above all of a closeness to
people that comes from sharing in
hardship.
The earthiness of the testimony and
the revival-tent setting also seemed to
provoke an unusual sense of populism
among the panelists.
the textile mills moved to the South in
search of cheap labor, he said, his own
grandfather had died working in the
mills in Massachusetts. “And my father
retired (from the mills) after 50 years
with a pension of eight dollars a month
less than yours,” the priest added.
Repeatedly, witnesses urged the
bishops and their advisers to use the
regional pastoral letter by the
Appalachian bishops, “This Land Is
Home To Me,” as a starting point for a
new social action program in the U.S.
Church.
The pastoral letter, issued in
February 1975, expresses in strong
poetic and biblical terms the rape of the
Appalachian land and its people in the
name of industry, energy, the economy
and progress.
St. Mary’s Home To Mark Its Centennial On Sept. 14
By Sister M.
Monica Hundertmark
At this time when everyone is
focusing attention on the past two
hundred years of our nation, St. Mary’s
Home - A Catholic Child Care Home -
on East Victory Drive has a short
memory of 100 years of its past.
St. Mary’s Home will observe its
100th anniversary of service in the
Diocese of Savannah on the 14 th of
September 1975. The Sisters, staff, and
children of St. Mary’s, extend a most
cordial welcome to all to share their
celebration of thanksgiving.
Bishop Raymond W. Lessard, of
Savannah, will be the principal celebrant
at the Centennial Mass scheduled for
1:00 p.m. A reception will follow until
5:00 p.m.
St. Mary’s Home had its beginning in
October 1875 when the Sisters of Mercy
and twenty-five parentless children took
up residence in the country' home that
once belonged to Mrs. J. Lama, the
mother of Sister Mary Gonzaga Lama.
This home was located at White Bluff,
nine miles from Savannah. The caring of
these young girls was no easy task as the
years were very trying due to the yellow
fever epidemic.
Prior to this move, the Sisters of
Mercy of St. Vincent’s Convent and
School, at the request of the Very
Reverend J. F. O’Neill, accepted into
their care twelve homeless young girls in
1845. For thirty years the Sisters taught
school, cared for, and supported the
orphans and themselves from a meager
income. Because of the increase of the
orphan children, it became necessary for
a Child Caring Home to come into its
own. So, it was that St. Mary’s Home
opened wide its doors to homeless girls
in 1875. There at White Bluff the Sisters
assumed exclusively the financial
burden involved in the care of the girls
by making weekly collections from door
to door.
From 1876 until 1877 some leading
Catholic laymen and laywomen
organized a society which had as its
purpose to relieve the Sisters from the
strain of the financial burden connected
with the maintenance of the young
girls. This society, established in 1877,
was given the title of the Female
Orphan Benevolent Society.
One great undertaking of the
Benevolent Society was to provide a
comfortable and convenient home for
the children. This home was located
within the city limits. It was through
the generosity of Captain Henry Blun,
then an officer of the Society, and
subsequently its president, that the lots
in the 1600 block on Habersham Street
were donated. Plans were finalized
under the leadership of the Right
Reverend William H. Gross, then Bishop
of Savannah, and Captain J.K. Reilly,
the first president of the Society, and a
modem building was erected. With the
assistance of the officers of the Society
and the generous citizens of the city,
Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, St.
Mary’s was paid for within two years.
The children and Sisters moved from
White Bluff to their new home on
Habersham Street May 2, 1883.
In 1885, application was made to the
Right Reverend Thomas A. Becker, the
new bishop, for permission to have the
Society chartered. This was
accomplished and placed on file and
recorded January 20, 1887.
Owing to the numerous applications,
the Society appealed to Bishop Becker
for permission to enlarge the home.
Permission was granted and ground was
broken for a new foundation on July
10, 1898. The annex was completed in
December 1899. The money was raised
by selling certain securities belonging to
the Society.
In 1903, the dining room was
enlarged and two classrooms were built,
and in 1906, the Spalding Annex was
made possible by Dr. R.D. Spalding of
Atlanta, Georgia. In the same year,
1906, the Right Reverend Benjamin J.
Keiley, then Bishop of Savannah,
elevated St. Mary’s Home into a
diocesan institution thus making it
possible to accept children from all
parts of Georgia. During these years
applications to St. Mary’s Home were
made to the President of the Society.
The number of applicants continued to
increase and St. Mary’s went through
many physical changes between the
years of 1896 and 1936.
One of the Right Reverend Gerald P.
O’Hara’s first acts as bishop of Savannah
was to plan a modern, fire-proof
building and spacious enough to care for
the children more comfortably. Ground
was broken for the present location of
St. Mary’s Home on Sunday, May 30,
1937. This lovely colonial type home
has been classified as one of the finest in
the city. It stands in the center of
spacious grounds and faces the famous
Victory Drive with its parkway of
towering palms on Route 80 East to
Savannah Beach. Mr. Cletus W. Bergen
of Savannah, Georgia was the architect.
It was hoped that the children and
Sisters would spend Christmas of 1937
in the new home. It was not officially
opened until July 14, 1938 when
Bishop O’Hara offered the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass and blessed the
new chapel. The seating capacity of the
chapel accomodated two hundred
people. On July 16, 1938, Bishop
O’Hara again celebrated Mass at the
Home, breakfasted with the Sisters and
Children and blessed the other parts of
the building and grounds.
Bishop O’Hara urged the entire
Diocese to become interested in St.
Mary’s Home. It has been and still is the
custom within the diocese to give the
Christmas collection from each parish to
St. Mary’s Home. Bishop O’Hara had
the happiness of clearing the debt on
the building when Savannah Catholics,
Protestants, and Jews presented him
with a check to cover the entire debt.
The bishops of Savannah have always
understood and supported St. Mary’s
Home.
Thus ends the story of the
development of the buildings for St.
Mary’s Home, but it does not bring to
an end the changes within St. Mary’s.
Prior to 1886 there were no definite
regulations in accepting girls other than
that they were orphaned and between
the ages of one and eighteen. They were
“comfortably lodged, tenderly cared for
by the Sisters and their temporal
interests looked after by the officers of
the Society, assisted by a few lady
collectors.” The increasing population
made it necessary to study the intake
procedure. In 1886, the Benevolent
Society, which controlled the policies of
the Home, laid down some definite
intake regulations. The girls had to be
between the ages of three and twelve,
orphaned, or with one parent who was
unable to maintain a household; and the
child being in danger, or abandoned.
When the child reached the age of
eighteen, she was turned over to the
next of kin.
In the early 1900’s the intake
procedure took another change. At this
time the admission of a child was to
receive care as a last resort and her stay
was only as long as parental inability
persisted. As soon as the home was
sufficiently rehabilitated to care for the
child, the child was returned to her
home. Each case was investigated by the
Vice-President of the Board, and parents
or relatives, who were able, were
expected to pay in full or in part for the
child’s care. Referrals were made by the
pastor, parents, or the Juvenile Court.
Those placed by parents or relatives
usually remained one year or less. Those
placed by pastors or the Juvenile Court
remained until they were of an age to
care for themselves. After the 1950’s St.
Mary’s was no longer an orphanage but
a home away from home. In 1967, the
intake policy accepted Boys between
the ages of six and twelve; and girls
between six and seventeen.
The admission procedures
experienced a more refined change in
1969 and in accordance with the
licensing standards of the State. The
intake procedures at the present time
are: 1) An agency sends to the home a
social summary with all the information
it has on the child or if no outside
agency is involved the Administration
takes care of the intake. A medical
examination signed by a competent
physician should accompany this
material. 2) It is important to review
academic records in order to insure
proper placement in school. 3) A
psychological evaluation is
recommended - when possible. 4) The
Administration with her Admissions’
Committee review the information, and,
if necessary this Committee seeks the
professional assistance of a psychiatrist
or a psychologist - before making a
final decision. 5) After a decision is
made the agency is notified and a
pre-placement visit is scheduled for the
child.
Education was always one of the
basic principles of St. Mary’s to provide
as much education for the girls as funds
would permit. In the early years, the
girls attended school at the Home to the
fifth grade and then completed their
elementary education at Sacred Heart
School. The girls of high school age
attended St. Vincent’s School. After
1952 the girls no longer attended classes
in the Home, but attended school at
Nativity, Blessed Sacrament, and St.
Vincent’s. It was in 1968 that the
houseparents no longer taught in the
school but devoted full time to St.
Mary’s and Social Work. After 1969 the
children attended both public and
private school. Some few were also
enrolled in special education classes at
(Continued on page 3)
SAINT MARY’S AT WHITE BLUFF - Front Row: Sr. M. Ansley, Sr.
M. DeSales Reilly and Sr. M. Felicitas. Back row: Mrs. Jennie Reilly
O’Byrne, Col. Peter Reilly, Mrs. O’Byrne and M. A. O’Byrne.
Saint Mary’s Home On Habersham Street
Opened in 1883