“Catholics Take Care of Each Other”
St. Stephen the First Martyr, Sanford
The town of Sanford, NC, sits where white beach sand from the coast meets the reddish clay of the Piedmont. Thus it has the right ingredients to be a large producer of clay bricks. In 1959, Sanford produced 10% of the bricks in the United States and was named "Brick Capital of the USA." Three years later, Bishop Vincent S. Waters dedicated a Catholic church there. It was made of brick, of course, and named after the patron saint of bricklayers, St. Stephen, the First Martyr.
St. Stephen merged two existing parishes in Sanford. The older, St. Marcella, had been established as a mission of Fayetteville in 1933. Our Lady of Lourdes, where Catholics of African Ancestry worshipped, had been in operation since xxxx. (An interesting note: Bishop Fulton Sheen took an interest in Our Lady of Lourdes, and was a benefactor. He gave the church his chalice, which is now at St. Stephen.)
The current St. Stephen Church, also of brick, was dedicated by Bishop F. Joseph Gossman in 2005. According to St. Stephen’s Pastor, Fr. Steve Carlson, the community envisions a new church on the property, with the present church being converted into a parish social hall. At the moment, he says, there isn’t space for large indoor gatherings, a noticeable need in a parish of around 1400 families. The congregation is about half Hispanic and half Anglo, with the Anglo half comprised mostly of retirees. The economy has had a significant impact on both these groups, according to Parish Administrator Cindy Marcelais: The Hispanics have suffered from the slowdown in the construction industry, and some of the retirees have seen their nest eggs shrinking. “Our offertory is down,” she says, “and requests for assistance are up.”
Ms. Marcelais praises St. Stephen as a welcoming church, however, in hard times as well as good ones. “We have a strong sense of community and hospitality,” she says, recalling her own arrival at the parish years ago. “Our Pastor would ask new members to stand up and be recognized at the end of Mass,” she says. “After Mass, a woman came up to me and said she worked at the local pharmacy, and to be sure to stop in. ‘We Catholics have to take care of each other,’ the woman said. ‘There aren’t so many of us down here.’”
Fr. Carlson speaks to a challenge facing many parishes in the Diocese with large Hispanic populations: unity. “There are Anglo and Hispanic members who embrace the idea of working and worshipping together,” he says, “and there are segments of both groups who prefer, for a myriad of reasons, to stay separate. What the Church teaches is that our core identity is Catholic – as St. Paul says, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free … for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Our challenge is to live that.”