Welcome to Mary Our Queen Parish
Regular Weekend Mass Schedule
Saturday at 5:00 PM (Vigil) ~ Sanctuary
Sunday at 8:30 AM ~ Sanctuary
Sunday at 11:00 AM ~ Sanctuary (Livestream of Mass available on website HERE)
Sunday at 5 PM ~ Sanctuary
Regular Daily Mass Schedule
Monday – 8:30 am
Tuesday – 12 Noon (Communion Service)
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday – 12 Noon
Sacrament of Reconciliation
Saturdays & Sundays: 3:30 pm to 4:25 pm before the 5pm Mass
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Mary Our Queen Catholic Church
Our mission is to lead all to Christ by living the Sacraments, teaching the Faith, & serving others.
GROWING UP CATHOLIC IN ATLANTA (fifth installment): I love this hobby of mine of interviewing octogenarian Catholics who grew up in Georgia. Their stories are just great. Today it is my pleasure to introduce one of the great gentlemen of our city, Ham Smith. My name is Howard Hamilton Smith, though everyone knows me as Ham. I was born in 1935, on Rivers Road, a half mile from the Cathedral of Christ the King. I was baptized in Sacred Heart Church (now Basilica), as it was, at the time, the closest parish near to where my family lived. Rivers Road is one of the many handsome drives that run through our Buckhead community, and that old home still stands. The village of Buckhead was little more than two cinemas, two drugstores and a hardware store when I was a youth, and Peachtree Road was lined with stately homes. There were almost enough Catholics living in our area to justify the building of Buckhead’s first parish, which was also Georgia’s co-cathedral. Christ the King would soon thereafter become the cathedral of the new Archdiocese of Atlanta. I have spent the better part of my life living in this community, and worshipping in this particular building. And I have personally known every rector and every bishop in its history. My father’s side of the family has deep Georgia roots. I am named after my father, who was called Howard, and he was named after an ancestor, Dr. John Hamilton Smith, who was an 18th century physician in Screven County, Georgia, which sits about half-way between Savannah and Augusta. It was my father who first came to Atlanta. At the age of 18, he moved here from Augusta, Georgia, where his father had been the editor of the local newspaper, “The Augusta Chronicle.” When he arrived, my father lived in a boarding house, and there he met my Catholic mother. Eligible Catholics weren’t all that plentiful in mostly-protestant Georgia back then, so my parents were fortunate to meet, to fall in love, and to eventually marry. Keep in mind that Atlanta was not even a hundred years old when my parents met here, and there was still living memory of the Civil War.With a name like Helen Coyne Riley, it is obvious that my mother is of Irish descent. Mother was a native of Syracuse, New York, and she moved to Atlanta fresh out of the Juilliard School of Music. At the time, Juilliard had a program whereby they would support a community that hired one of their graduates to bring music and culture to parts of the country that needed refinement, and Atlanta was one such place. So, a group of Atlanta ladies brought my mother south, to help pull together a symphony, and to promote classical music in this relatively new city. But in 1938, when Christ the King was dedicated, the then rector, Monsignor Moylan, employed my mother to become the cathedral’s first musical director. There were simply not enough trained Catholic musicians at the time, so mother hired protestants to sing at the Dedication Mass. She became the cathedral’s first choirmaster and organist, and she spent ten years of her professional life up in that choir loft. She built a fine program, and even offered workshops on chant for other Georgia choirmasters and cantors. The cathedral was like a second home to me growing up. I remember singing “Gesu Bambino” as a boy soprano at Midnight Mass from that same choir loft. Our cathedral was built way out in the suburbs, far from downtown. I found out much later that my own father had contributed $10,000 in 1938 towards the construction of the cathedral. That would have been a fortune at the time. Among its founders were some of the oldest Catholic families in Atlanta, including the Spaldings, the Haverties, and Mr. & Mrs. Alex Smith. I remember Miss May Haverty founding a Catholic Study Club in her West Wesley home where Catholics met to read great literature, and shared tea and crumpets. The cathedral had some great priests, too, like Monsignor Moylan, whose homilies were so erudite that you almost needed to bring a thesaurus with you to Mass. He was a passionate anti-Communist, and once he even preached against Communism on Christmas eve! Monsignor Cassidy was another cultured priest who served our community. He too was quite the wordsmith with his homilies, and he loved classical music. He even purchased a phonograph player for our nuns and bought them records for all of Beethoven’s symphonies. But Monsignor Cassidy was not content to just stay in the city. Before coming to the cathedral, he was also famous for having a trailer with an altar in it that he hauled all over the north Georgia mountains stopping to offer Mass in communities spread out all over rural Georgia. With regards to my education, I began in Miss Bloodworth’s Kindergarten school over on Peachtree Battle Road (and that little building still stands). I spent grades one through eight at Christ the King school, where I was taught by the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. I remember fondly Sister of Evangeline, Sister Mary of Charity, and others, with their deep devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague. Their little statue is still in our cathedral, out of place by style, scale and design, but it reminds me of them every time I see it. I remember when Sister Mary of Charity decided that we eighth graders needed to be taught the facts of life. She divided the boys from the girls, and she explained everything to us so technically, using all the right theological words, that we were more confused than when she started. Still, the Grey Nuns were wonderful teachers. I never remember them being cruel, or ever using a ruler, but one day when my own mother substituted at the school, mother made me stand in time out in the cloak room, and then she accidently went home leaving me still standing there. From my childhood, I dreamed of becoming a priest. I remember having an altar built by my father in my bedroom where I pretended to offer Mass, and I even had vestments. My brother would serve my “mass” but he would never stay for my “homilies.” Growing up, I served Masses at Christ the King Cathedral from the beginning, wearing my red cassock and donning my white surplice. I loved the drama of the liturgy, especially the high, solemn, pontifical Masses, with all of its powerful ritual. Whenever a bishop or the archbishop would say Mass, we had a pontifical Mass, and I would serve as the master of ceremonies, quietly clapping my hands to indicate to the other servers their next move. We altar boys liked serving weddings, because we usually got paid something, and we liked funerals, because, of course, we got out of class. But really, I loved the Mass. I still do, though if I am honest, a sometimes casual approach and a lack of decorum in the liturgy still bother me. When I told my father that I wanted to become a priest, he never discouraged me, but he rightfully sensed that while the liturgies at the cathedral were very fine, a priest in Georgia at the time could be stationed far from the city, and their experience of priesthood was (and is) different from that of our lovely cathedral. Returning to my education, from Christ the King, I moved up to high school at Marist, which was downtown then, nearby Sacred Heart. It was Atlanta’s version of the Citadel, and we cadets marched to class and on our parade ground. The non-Catholic kids would tease us boys on the bus, saying that we looked like bellhops. But again, I received an excellent education at Marist. I remember fondly Fr. Brennan and Fr. McGuire. I also remember Fr. Hageman, who drilled the rules of grammar so deep into us all that we never had trouble in universities. Most Catholic boys in Atlanta attended Marist, but some very fine non-Catholics would also be among our classmates. I had classmates from prominent protestant families in the city, and I also had a classmate, Tony Montag, who is from one of the most prominent Jewish families in Atlanta. Music was important even at Marist, where I was the pianist for the glee club. Still, Marist was a military school, and I graduated a Cadet Lieutenant Colonel. Something of that military training at Marist stuck with me, as some years later I would go on to Navy Officer Candidate School, and serve for three years of active duty on the USS Forrestal, and aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. During my deployment, we lost four pilots, and two of them were Catholic. Myself, and three friends, a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian and a Jew all had access to a “St. Gregory Hymnal,” so we could sing for a Requiem Mass in four-part harmony. Music has simply always been a part of my life, even in the Navy. Growing up Catholic in Georgia in the 1940s had its challenges. We Catholics were warned not to attend non-Catholic services, and for good reason. There were some pastors in Atlanta who had a virulent hatred for Catholics, and could make the most ridiculous claims in their fiery sermons. I could name names here. Sadly, these were not just uneducated country preachers. Some of them pastored prominent churches in town. There was even an silly rumor that there was supposedly a secret tunnel between the cathedral rectory and the nearby convent so that there could be elicit sexual encounters between our priests and our nuns. This anti-Catholic bigotry was based upon prejudice, misunderstanding, and ignorance, of course. No doubt Catholicism, with our Latin liturgies, must have seemed so strange and foreign to outsiders. Still, we Catholics were so few and far between, we naturally had non-Catholic friends, and we would go to their weddings and their funerals, and we became their friends. Personally, I found that most of my non-Catholic friends and contemporaries were respectful, and I never grew weary of enlightening them about Catholicism if they were sincerely curious, and most seemed to appreciate this. I eventually attended Emory University, which in those days was very much still a Methodist College, where there were only three Catholics in my fraternity. I majored in history at Emory. We were required to take an Introduction to the Bible class at Emory, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and wherein a learned quite a bit. As Catholics in the 1950s, we knew our catechism, but a cultured and learned man needs to know his Bible, too. Far from weakening my Catholic Faith, I found that Emory made it stronger as I learned to defend my Catholicism through some extraordinary grace, sometimes sitting at Manuel’s drinking beer, and explaining Catholic doctrine to my buddies. We Catholics attended the Newman Club, and we went to confession at St. Thomas More in Decatur (hoping to snag the one priest who was half-deaf, ha). At Emory, there was a professor George Cuttino, from Newnan, who was well-known as a tenured professor and was also an atheist. He provoked all the freshmen saying that there were three great mistakes in the history of the west. The first, he claimed, was St. Paul, who he felt institutionalize Jesus. The second, he claimed, was the Protestant Reformation, which obviously provoked all my protestant classmates. Dr. Cuttino said that protestantism was more a political rebellion of German princes against the Holy Roman Emperor. Dr. Cuttino had no faith, but he was otherwise curiously very pro-Catholic. The other mistake, according to Dr. Cuttino, was the American Revolution. Cuttino was such an anglophile. He was a delightful man, and we all learned a lot from him. At Emory, I was the pianist and organist for the Glee Club, and we would go all over Georgia, to many Methodist churches in small towns, singing our Christmas music and our spirituals, for which we were well known. At Emory, I was the president of my fraternity, and I made the Senior Honors Society. I was even a finalist for Rhodes Scholar, though I lost out to my friend, Bob Edge. But now, back to music. If I am honest about the Church, it must be said that the most momentous change in my lifetime were those changes that immediately followed the Second Vatican Council, where all the bishops in the world had convened, and where they opened up the opportunity for use of the vernacular in Catholic worship. There were things that were meritorious in some of these post Vatican-II changes, like allowing women to sing in our choirs. But for the most part, this was a huge culture shock to Catholics, and in particular to Catholic musicians. We were “officially” told that Latin chant was to be treasured and preserved, but rarely was that directive being observed. We felt that a rug had just been pulled out from under us. Please note that as I say this, I weathered this storm, so my perspective is not that of a critical outsider, but is rather that of someone who genuinely loves his Church and his Faith, and who managed through all of this. It was as if, overnight, 1900 years-worth of musical patrimony was no longer acceptable, and we were left with little to no direction as Catholic musicians. My mother had retired from the cathedral in 1948, and Mrs. Jane MacAvoy took up her mantle, and carried on successfully. The program continued to thrive under Jane, and in Holy Week we would have Tenebrae three times a week at the cathedral, and it was just beautiful. But she retired with the changes of Vatican II. She was frustrated, as no one knew what to do. The music just seemed to die. My mother attended Mass one Sunday, and announced to the then rector, Fr. John McDonough, that she found the music below cathedral standards. That same week Fr. McDonough reached out to me. I was then working at Sun Trust. He asked me to take over. While continuing my career at Sun Trust, I became the Director of Music at the Cathedral, and I held that title for fifty years (now as Director of Music emeritus). From the beginning, I declined a salary, but asked instead that whatever I might have been paid could go towards paid staff singers, and that is how we began to rebuild the program. We scrambled to find suitable music, and I even composed some myself. The cathedral repertoire has been building ever since, and today we have a fine musical program. Many Catholics drive from far and wide to worship here. You cannot have good liturgy without good music. I love my Church, my Catholic Faith, my city and my parish. My faith and my passion for music are intertwined. Music is just in the blood. When I graduated in 1962 with my MBA from Warton in Philadelphia, my mother came to the graduation. She had wanted to go to Paris with a great number of prominent Atlanta art patrons that year, but because I graduated when I did, she was not in the infamous Orly Air Crash in June that took 106 lives of Atlanta’s most generous supporters of the arts, who were thereafter memorialized in the Woodruff Arts Center. What my mother understood, when she was brought down from Juilliard to Atlanta, is that music, like faith, has an ability to civilize us, and in a way, music also helps us to overcome bigotry. Musicians would sing or play in protestant churches, Catholic churches, and in Jewish synagogues, and this brought Atlantans together. For example, while I took my organ lessons at home on a rented electric organ, the first pipe organ I played was the one at Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church. And I have carried on in my mother’s footsteps, for even today I am on the Board of Counselors of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. At nearly 89 years of age, I can say that I am a blessed man. My Catholic faith is so dear to me. Me, my beautiful wife, Mason, and our family have been so enriched by God’s great grace. And I hope that I have helped Atlantans praise the Lord God Most High. To him be all glory, now and forever. Amen.