History of the Church of the Holy Family
We began as part
of Star of the Sea parish, the oldest parish in Virginia Beach. As the
City of Virginia Beach began to grow in the early 1970's, Fr. Paul Gaughan,
pastor at Star of the Sea, met with residents of the Great Neck area to
plan a new parish. As these conversations progressed, a group of Great
Neck area Catholics arranged with Francis Asbury United Methodist Church
for a Saturday evening Mass, beginning in June of 1975. In January of 1976,
area Catholics also gathered for Mass on Sunday at Trantwood Elementary
School. By June of 1977, over 500 area households gathered each weekend
for Eucharist.
In the 1960's,
Bishop John J. Russell anticipated the growth of Virginia Beach, and purchased
land on main roads in various parts of the city. He acquired property at
the intersection of North Great Neck Road and First Colonial Road, the
site of our worship space.
Bishop Walter
F. Sullivan appointed our first pastor, Fr. Thomas Reardon, in June of
1977, and created the new parish of Church of the Holy Family. Bishop Sullivan
selected this name from several proposed by parishioners. Later that fall,
Fr. Reardon organized a Parish Council and various standing committees.
Within a year we produced a long-term planning commission and parish mission
statement.
In early, December
of 1978, Fr. James E. Dorson succeeded Fr. Reardon as pastor. Fr. Dorson
remained our pastor for the next twelve years.
We rapidly outgrew
our arrangement with Trantwood School and Francis Asbury Church. In May
of 1979, we moved our weekend liturgies to Cape Henry Collegiate School
on First Colonial Road. Starting in the fall of 1979, we organized
a building fund and engaged the architectural firm of Oliver, Smith and
Cooke to design our building. By February of 1980, we met our initial fund-raising
goals and submitted building plans to Bishop Sullivan. We broke ground
on June 22, 1980 and on August 27, 1981, Bishop Sullivan dedicated our
finished building, although we began celebrating liturgies in the building's
Family Room a few months earlier.
After our initial
six-year marathon of organizing and building, we settled into the multiple,
on-going tasks of responding creatively to the steady growth in the Great
Neck area, the increasing numbers of Catholic families, and the changing
nature of life in Virginia Beach while striving to retain the sense of
community and ministry which characterized our initial nomadic years.
In December of
1991, after eleven and a half years as Pastor, Fr. Dorson left the parish
to spend his last six months on sabbatical. Fr. Al Pereria, a retired priest
of the diocese, acted as parish administrator for the final six months
of Fr. Dorson's twelve year tenure with Holy Family. In June of 1991, Fr.
Richard Mooney took up the pastorate. At the conclusion of nine years at
Holy Family, Fr. Mooney was succeeded by Fr. Thomas J. Quinlan in 2000.
Between 1981
and the present, we grew into one of the ten largest parishes in the Diocese
of Richmond with numbers averaging twelve hundred registered households.
We responded by instituting a series of regular parish-wide events which
became trademarks of the Holy Family life. Coffee and donuts in
the Family Room after the Sunday Masses became a regular parish fixture.
The annual Parish Fair, instituted even before the building was built,
gave us a chance each June to entertain the whole area with rides, booths,
games, food, and entertainment. Parish progressive dinners offered parishioners
opportunities to meet each other socially. Potlucks, picnics, dinner dances,
newcomer welcomes, and many other events scheduled regularly through the
year helped new families find a home and veterans keep connected
with the on-going life of our parish.
Many new families,
and a greater diversity of ages within the parish, helped us sustain volunteer-based
Christian formation programs for our children and high school youth under
the guidance of a succession of talented Ministers of Christian Formation
over the years. Youth Ministry emerged as an energetic focus of middle
and high school faith formation, with social activities and service projects
benefiting groups within the parish and in the larger community. Each year,
for several years, parish youth wrote and performed a one-act play, usually
a comedy, around themes of Christian living, for the whole community to
enjoy.
Largely as a
result of our growing numbers and the demands of religious education programs
and parish life, we embarked on an expansion program in 1997, consulting
with the parish as a whole through a series of town meetings to determine
how our building should respond to our life as a parish. As a result of
those efforts, we dedicated our new spaces in late 2000, opening the parish
center with offices and meeting spaces designed to respond not only to
the needs of parishioners but also to requirements of the surrounding community.
As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we see scouts, support groups and
civic organizations sharing our spaces and we are preparing for a parish
pre-school on site.
Our 1992 Parish
Council approved the formation of a parish-based Knights of Columbus Council,
and Pope Leo XIII Council was organized the following year. The Knights
and the ladies in the Auxiliary contributed much-appreciated hours of effort
to numerous parish events and projects, sponsoring family breakfasts, ice
cream socials, and seasonal parties. The efforts of the Knights also made
possible the acquisition of new tables and chairs for parish use.
When Virginia
Beach General Hospital emerged as a large, modern hospital and the anchor
for an extensive area health-care and medical establishment, we responded
with volunteer pastoral care ministries within the various institutions,
culminating in 1993 when we created a unique new staff position, the Parish
Health Care Minister. He provides on-going professional pastoral care to
Catholics both within and outside the parish, in the midst of medical trauma
and hospitalization. The ministry of Pastoral Care also encompasses ongoing
support for persons and families affected by illness, addiction, death
and bereavement issues.
As Great Neck
became known as an attractive retirement destination, we organized
our Nifty-over-50 group, which quickly established a reputation
not only for its craft shows, meals together, and trips, but also for its
many quiet contributions to parish community and ministry. As the group’s
numbers and interests grew, the members determined that a new name was
needed and our seasoned citizens became known as the J.O.Y. Group
(“Just Older Youth”).
The Great Neck
area became a spawning ground for small businesses of all sorts, the home
of many professionals, and a haven for the increased concentration of military
personnel following the nationwide down-sizing of the armed forces
in the early 1990's. The parish responded with strong programs and processes
in adult formation and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. In the
mid 1990's, new program directions included Landings, a process
for each Catholic returning to active participation after a long absence.
The parish presently enjoys adult formation in several forms, including
Sunday morning sessions on a variety of topics from bioethical issues to
Catholic identity, and regularly scheduled evening courses taught by the
pastor.
We have sustained
a tradition of dynamic social outreach through the years as we became a
source of support to parishioners and non-parishioners alike-especially
during the economically challenging late 1980's and early 1990's. We joined
with other religious communities in Winter Watch, the homeless shelter
program, as well as organizing our own annual Giving Tree and Life Support
projects. We dispersed as much as ten percent of our annual budget for
the direct support of individuals, families and organizations in need.
The parish today has many outreach ministries in operation, from Habitat
for Humanity to migrant ministry, from soup kitchen work to a busy food
pantry service.
Beginning in
the late 1980's, we began a performing arts group, the Holy Family Players,
and mounted annual productions of such musicals as Godspell, Once
Upon a Mattress and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
comedies such as The Matchmaker, and even a home-grown musical comedy,
Between
the Masses," entirely written by several parishioners.
We enhanced our
worship with adult and children's choirs, the purchase of a concert grand
piano and an electric organ-synthesizer as well as handbells. We upgraded
our original sound system in the worship place with a more efficient and
effective system, and, in celebration of our 25th anniversary, we installed
a new sound system and a concert-grade organ and speakers. Under the capable
guide of our Ministers of Music, our instruments and choirs have been supported
by parish instrumentalists of all sorts, from flute to drum, bassoon to
horn and violin. The Liturgy Committee, with its Planning Teams and its
Art and Environment Group, has worked year-in and year-out to craft solid
celebrations of the church's sacraments.
In 2001, Holy
Family embarked on a house-church program, where the entire parish was
divided into over 40 neighborhood-based groups of about 25 households.
The groups meet once a month throughout the academic year to pray and study
scripture together as well to offer one another ongoing support. Each of
the house church groups selects an Elder to serve on an Elders’ Council
which shares in setting parish vision and direction with the pastor and
staff.
Holy Family in
2002 is an intentional parish community. Parishioners do not belong simply
because they live inside the parish boundaries, but because they believe
in what the parish stands for: the People of God living out their baptism
in ministry. That means that all adult and teenage members of the community
are expected to engage in ministry in some form, whether Christian Formation,
justice and peace, liturgy and music, pastoral care, web site creation
and maintenance or administration and community life.
Behind all these
adaptations and accomplishments are a great many names of holy, dynamic
and ministerial people who have served here at Holy Family in our 25 years.
There is not space to list them all. Many are still with us. Many more
have moved on to new parishes. Still others have gone before us in faith,
and await the Reign of God. As Church of the Holy Family we have made our
mark on Virginia Beach. We face a future full of promise with the example
of years of Christian community and service behind us.
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