Mission Accomplished
Santa Clara, Magnolia
On Sunday, June 29, the Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge dedicated a new church for the Mission Parish of Santa Clara in Magnolia, NC. The new church replaces a trailer which had served as Magnolia’s church since it was begun as a Mission of Immaculate Conception in Clinton in the ‘90s.
Msgr. Williams, then Pastor of Immaculate Conception, had discovered a concentration of Hispanic Catholics living 17 miles from Clinton, many of them in a trailer park outside Magnolia called Hidden Valley Plantation. “We began by having ‘field Masses’ in the front yards of homes in the park,” Msgr. Williams recalled. Eventually he talked to Mr. Nash Johnson, who attended Immaculate Conception and along with his father was one of the largest turkey/poultry producers in the state, and the employer of many of the mostly Mexican residents of the park. Johnson offered one of the trailers his business normally used to house workers to be used as a church. “Nash Johnson’s father,” Msgr. Williams remembered, “wasn’t Catholic, but he had great sympathy for the workers and a great admiration for their family life. ‘This is the way family used to be,’ he would say, ‘when one home would become everyone’s home.’”
Gradually the Catholic Community grew and leadership formed, many of the leaders on fire with the Holy Spirit from their experiences in Cursillo. Father Patrick Keane, now Pastor of our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Newton Grove, was a seminarian in the summer of 1999, and worked at Hidden Valley. “I was driving many miles a day,” Father Keane recalled, “and I gained a real appreciation for the amount of work involved in a rural mission.”
Another helper at the mission was Sister Ancilla Maloney, IHM. Sister Ancilla was from the Bronx, NY, and each summer for years she would arrive for four weeks with a team of bilingual high school sophomores from New York and conduct Vacation Bible School at various locations in Sampson and Duplin Counties. In 1998, a Salvadoran priest, Father Jose Antonio Galvez, became parochial vicar at Immaculate Conception. Father Galvez was a Franciscan, and it was he who suggested that the mission (called until now “Hidden Valley” or “Magnolia”) be named after St. Clare of Assisi, one of the first followers of St. Francis.
When Sisters of Divine Providence Theresine Gildea and Maxine Tancraitor arrived at Santa Clara, they began teaching, training catechists and preparing children for the Sacraments while also looking after the material and spiritual needs of new immigrant families.
Serious fundraising for a new church began in 2003. Parishioners held food sales at soccer games, fairs – every opportunity. Helped by a generous grant from the Diocese and gifts from the Knights of Columbus, and other benefactors from nearby and as far away as California and the Bahamas, the parishioners of Santa Clara acquired enough to begin. In 2004, Nash Johnson’s sister Linda donated ten acres of land in the town of Magnolia for the future church.
Along with Father Philip Tighe, then Pastor of Immaculate Conception, a crew of workers armed with chainsaws and machetes began clearing the donated land. Finally, the dimensions for a church were determined and approved. In 2007, Father Tighe was succeeded as Pastor in Clinton by Father Fernando Torres.
Santa Clara was the second church in the Diocese dedicated by Bishop Burbidge, who dedicated the new Holy Cross Church in Durham last December. Recognized at the dedication, in addition to the priests mentioned above, for their work at Santa Clara were Father Bill Upah, Father Gabriel Jaimes, Father Wiliam Restrepo and Father Luis Alberto Domicó. Formerly a Mission of Immaculate Conception, Santa Clara will now become a Mission of Maria Reina de las Americas in Mt. Olive, with Father Edgar Sepulveda as supervising Pastor.