Pastoral Visit Day 5 | June 21

If Day 1 began with the smallest community of the entire Pastoral Visit, Day 2 made clear that smallness is never the whole story. Bishop Fabre traveled south through three counties — Hampton, Jasper and Beaufort — covering the length of the Lowcountry in a single day.

The contrasts here are hard to ignore: gated developments and retirement communities rising up alongside deepened poverty, making it harder and harder for the people who have served these communities for decades to actually live in them.

Bishop Fabre spent Father’s Day among those communities — at St. Mary Mission in Hampton and St. Anthony in Ridgeland — celebrating Mass, listening and asking hard questions about the Church’s future in a place where the need keeps growing. The day closed around a dinner table in Bluffton, with the religious sisters of the deanery: women who, quietly and without fanfare, are holding much of this mission of service together.

The thread running through the whole day was this: faithfulness requires structure. And structure means planning for the people who come after us.

Presence is Strategy

The day opened at St. Mary Mission in Hampton, where Bishop Fabre celebrated Mass and returned to the same themes from Day 1: persecution, dealing with fear, and where we find our strength.

He asked the congregation to watch through the week for who is being persecuted — and for what. He said not to look just for the dramatic forms, but the quiet ones, such as the family member who tells the truth and becomes the enemy for it, or the person who stands for something, but suddenly stands alone.

The listening session that followed was lively and unhurried. Bishop Fabre was welcomed to “the hometown of the world-famous Watermelon Festival,” which drew laughter and set a warm tone. Parishioners shared the parish’s history with obvious pride: Its founding by Msgr. Roy Aiken, and its resilience through every turn since.

A real estate developer once told a parishioner, “Give it time. They’re coming. It’s going to develop into a major neighborhood,” and that prediction is proving true.

And Bishop Fabre made the challenge plain: the Church must be ready to receive what is coming; evangelization is not optional; go out, invite someone; share your faith as a life not as an argument.

Faith that Multiplies

At St. Anthony in Ridgeland, Msgr. Ronald R. Cellini, the Beaufort dean, opened the English-language listening session by sharing the remarkable founding story of the parish: a man who drove annually from New York to Florida, stopped to worship at a small church in Pineville and eventually told the pastor, “These people need a real church.”

Land donated by a local family, a church funded by a stranger — the congregation that exists today is the fruit of ordinary people who saw a need and responded. Bishop Fabre built on that history to challenge the community: follow young people after confirmation, refuse to let them slip away, knock on doors and ask what happened if they do.

The Spanish-language session was the most theologically engaged conversation of the day. Parishioners pressed Bishop Fabre on finances, building repairs, youth ministry and the role of retreats in formation. He was candid in return. Retreats that produce emotional highs without deepening knowledge of the faith, he said, are “like a sack with a hole in it — you keep pouring in and nothing stays.”

What communities need is formation: knowing the Creed, the commandments, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the liturgical year, faith that can be lived and defended because we know what we believe and why it matters.

Bishop Fabre closed with characteristic warmth and humor, including a story involving a very patient statue of St. Anthony and a man with a machete looking for a job.

Keeping the Mission Alive

The day ended at dinner with the religious sisters of the Bluffton Deanery; it was less a reception than a working conversation about the future of consecrated religious life in the Lowcountry. The sisters were candid: their numbers are declining, succession planning has been inadequate, and ministries built on the charism of specific communities risk collapsing when those sisters move on.

Bishop Fabre listened and responded with both honesty and hope. He is in conversation with religious congregations about sending sisters to the region, asking the deanery to coordinate ministries more formally, and making one quiet but significant request — that at least one deanery meeting each year gather all the sisters together, so the whole body knows what each part is doing.

Reflection

Hampton County. Jasper County. Beaufort County. In each one is the same reality: the Church is already here, already working, already serving people the broader world has not noticed yet. The question Bishop Fabre kept returning to across every conversation is not whether the Church will show up; it already has. The question is whether what we are building will last beyond the people who built it. Are we building structures, or personalities? Are we forming the next generation, or assuming someone else will? Are we inviting, or only maintaining?

The answer starts small. Follow one young person after confirmation. Invite one neighbor to Mass. Teach one class on the Creed. Begin there. And then — as the founding story of St. Anthony in Ridgeland reminds us — maybe trust that God will send someone from New York to pay for what comes next!

Looking Ahead

Day 3 moves to Hardeeville, where Msgr. Cellini will host Bishop Fabre for breakfast with Department of Transportation officials, a tour of future parish land, lunch with city officials at the Hardeeville Recreation Center, and Mass and listening sessions with both the English and Spanish communities of St. Anthony Mission. Hardeeville sits at one of the fastest-growing intersections in the Lowcountry — and the Church is already planning for what comes next.

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Please credit: Doug Deas/The Miscellany