Hilton Head’s Holy Family church starts Catholic explosion in Beaufort County

When Dot Gnann was a child, the Catholic priest came to Bluffton once a month.

He came clacking deep into the quiet countryside aboard the Boll Weevil train from Charleston. Gnann’s father took the buggy to pick him up at the Pritchardville depot. He would stay through Wednesday, conducting Mass at a little church in the woods called St. Andrew, drilling children in the catechism and visiting the faithful in a large family farming compound known as Pinckney Colony.

It was a similar story across the river in Beaufort, where St. Peter’s Catholic Church was built in 1846, the first since Spanish settlers attended Mass on Parris Island almost 300 years earlier.

Today, Beaufort County is home to four large Catholic parishes serving well more than 10,000 families and countless visitors. It has three Catholic grade schools and a new high school. And over the years, its nuns have reached into the darkest corners of the Lowcountry, ministering to the unseen.

The floodgates for Catholicism in Beaufort County were opened by Holy Family Catholic Church on Hilton Head Island.

This Saturday, the parish of some 750 families will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Holy Family reflects the story of Beaufort County, with its rapid-fire booms of tourists, retirees and Hispanics.

“It has been an interesting time,” says Joann Capin of Palmetto Dunes, one of Holy Family’s longest-serving members. “We feel very lucky to have been here for it.”

Mass in a bar

On Saturday, the Most Rev. Robert E. Guglielmone, bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, will join pastor Monsignor Joseph F. Hanley in celebrating Mass at 5 p.m., followed by an anniversary reception at the church.

The church at 24 Pope Ave. — with seating for more than 1,000, artwork by Wayne Edwards and a Zimmer organ with 2,619 pipes — had much more humble beginnings.

In 1961, the Rev. John A. Siminon began saying Mass for several Catholic employees of the new Sea Pines development company.

This took place in the summer months at the William Hilton Inn and later included services down the beach at the Adventure Inn.

When Joann and Joe Capin moved to Hilton Head in 1968 for him to open a pharmacy at Coligny Plaza, Saturday evening Mass was accompanied by the sound of cocktail shakers in the bar on the other side of a partition at the Adventure Inn. At Sunday morning Mass, little Jennifer Capin and other children sat at the bar, now quiet but still a good place to grab some fresh fruit.

In the summer, Joann Capin recalls, more people came than could fit in the room. They stood on the patio outside, where they could neither see nor hear the service.

“We passed the collection plate out the door to that patio,” Joann said, “and we often wondered: ‘Is it going to come back in?’ ”

Growth explosion

It came back in enough for the gathering to be designated a mission in 1966. The Rev. Paul F. Seitz was assigned pastor of the St. Andrew parish at Pinckney Colony, also serving the small Hilton Head, Hardeeville and Ridgeland churches.

The family of Sea Pines founder Charles E. Fraser donated five acres of land for the church, just as it had done for Baptists, Episcopalians and Methodists.

A decade after the first services for those few Sea Pines employees, ground was broken for a building.

“We grew so fast, we had to constantly expand, just like my drugstore did,” Joe Capin said.

Not long after moving into its first sanctuary, the church bought 4.5 more acres, and in 1988 it dedicated its current sanctuary that holds 1,200 to 1,500 people.

When an education building and parish hall were added in 1977, it was named for the first pastor assigned to the Holy Family parish, the Rev. David A. Schiller.

On Easter, the church had to put up tents and conduct up to four services at the same time, inside and outside, attended by 7,000 to 10,000 people.

Our newspaper had a picture of a priest in flowing robe directing the traffic jam on Pope Avenue on an Easter Sunday. The Associated Press picked it up and shared it with the world.

A beloved pastor during the growth explosion was the Rev. Phillip A. Hamilton, who once rode a motorcycle in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with his dog, Suspect. He always said Suspect was “of suspicious origins.” Father Hamilton would play the piano with Suspect sitting beside him on the bench, howling.

New missions

In 1983, Holy Family gave $40,000 seed money for the St. Francis by the Sea Catholic Church on the north end of Hilton Head.

It began worship in the Crazy Crab Restaurant, jokingly calling itself the Church of the Holy Crab. It now serves some 3,000 families.

Larger still is the St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church in Bluffton, which dedicated its first building in 2000.

And meanwhile, the St. Peter’s parish moved from downtown Beaufort to Lady’s Island in 1987 to accommodate growth that now includes a large church and school on 35 acres.

Anne Scott of TidePointe is the only surviving original member of Holy Family. She just turned 94.

The retiree demographic is outpaced at the church by the tourists. On any given Sunday, seven of 10 worshipers at Holy Family are likely to be island visitors.

The newest dynamic is the Hispanic influx. Holy Family reflects changes in its neighborhood.

In 2000, Holy Family named Nora Bess director of a new Spanish ministry. It came some five years after St. Francis established a Spanish ministry, making the Catholic churches leading institutions in addressing the needs of Hispanics that came pouring into southern Beaufort County.

Holy Family has a weekly Spanish Mass. At a recent First Communion, 54 children were Hispanic and seven were Anglos. In April, two Hispanic women were appointed to the Parish Council.

In early 2013, the Rev. Jorge Gallo, a Claretian priest from Colombia, South America, was assigned as parochial vicar for both Holy Family and St. Francis. His principal ministry is to the Hispanic Catholic community.

Holy Family hosts an ecumenical soup kitchen twice a week. It has a weekly food pantry. It does a lot of social and educational work, coordinating with organizations such as The Literacy Center and Neighborhood Outreach Connection.

“We are filling that void of the nuclear family they left behind — the aunts, uncles and cousins,” Bess said. “Now they have a church family.”

When you think about it, the mission was similar in the 16th century when priests prayed feverishly for supplies to arrive at the Santa Elena settlement on Port Royal Sound, or rode the Boll Weevil train to the dirt roads of Pinckney Colony, or shouted over the cocktail shakers as Hilton Head swirled to life.

This story was originally published June 4, 2016 at 7:56 PM with the headline "Hilton Head’s Holy Family church starts Catholic explosion in Beaufort County."