Hartmayer 2026 Priest Assignments Close 72-Year Passionist Chapter

Archbishop Gregory John Hartmayer, OFM Conv., of Atlanta announced June 4 a second round of 2026 priest assignments, and the central appointment closes 72 years of Passionist ministry at one of the archdiocese’s most historically significant parishes. Father Israel J. Rodriguez, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, will become pastor of St. Paul of the Cross Church in west Atlanta on July 1, the first secular diocesan priest to lead that congregation since the Congregation of the Passion (CP) founded it in 1954 to serve the city’s African American Catholic community.

The announcement follows a first round of assignments released on May 15 and adds eight appointments effective the same date. Together they reshape pastoral leadership across an archdiocese responsible for more than 1 million Catholics in 69 counties of north and central Georgia.

The July 1 Roster

Eight appointments make up the second round, spanning parish leadership, campus ministry, and one outbound seminary faculty posting.

Two of the moves formalize arrangements already in place. Father Cong Nguyen has run St. Francis of Assisi Church in Blairsville as administrator; this announcement gives him the full pastor title, locking in his standing at the mountain parish he was already leading. Father Jose Enrique Quintero, already living at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a priest in residence, picks up formal parochial vicar duties at the same address.

Father Carl Jean keeps his chaplaincy to Atlanta’s Haitian Catholic community while gaining a residential posting at Our Lady of Lourdes Rectory. Father Dominic Tran becomes administrator at Our Lady of La Vang Mission in Marietta, a Vietnamese Catholic parish named for a 19th-century Marian apparition venerated in Vietnam. Father Ben Thomsen moves to the teaching faculty of Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, a regional formation institution that serves seminarians from more than a dozen Southern dioceses, an outbound academic placement that stands apart in a cycle otherwise centered on parish work.

The Passionists’ 72 Years at St. Paul of the Cross

• 72 years of Passionist ministry, from the 1954 founding through this summer’s transition
• 37 acres of northwest Atlanta campus, including the church, convent, and former school
• 30-plus Passionist priests and brothers who served the parish across those decades
• ~700 families on the rolls by 1999, then Atlanta’s largest majority-African American Catholic parish

Founded in the Jim Crow South

The Passionists came to Atlanta at a direct episcopal invitation. In 1954, Bishop Francis E. Hyland of the Diocese of Savannah-Atlanta asked the order to establish a parish for the city’s growing African American Catholic population in a neighborhood still governed by segregation. The Congregation of the Passion, a religious order founded in 18th-century Italy and known for preaching missions in underserved communities, had been expanding its pastoral work across the American South and accepted the assignment with a stated focus on serving African American families.

The new parish was carved from the territory of Our Lady of Lourdes, at that point Atlanta’s only Catholic church explicitly serving Black residents. Father Emmanuel Trainor, a Passionist, became the first pastor. Without a building yet, the congregation held its first Mass on January 20, 1955, in the assembly room of McLendon Hospital. A school and convent opened in 1957 and 1958, staffed originally by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, Pennsylvania. The church building was dedicated by Bishop Hyland on October 23, 1960, on a 37-acre campus in northwest Atlanta.

The timing placed the Passionists at the center of one of Atlanta’s most charged civic chapters. The church building opened in 1960, two years before Archbishop Paul John Hallinan desegregated the parish and every other archdiocesan institution by formal order in 1962. The congregation had by then been worshipping together for seven years, and the legal change confirmed what the community had quietly built. As the Passionist Historical Archives notes in its documentation of the Atlanta mission, parishioners built their faith through prayerful worship, education, and a commitment to racial justice that extended well beyond Sunday Mass.

A Parish That Grew Beyond Its Founding Brief

According to the parish’s own published history, more than 30 priests and brothers from the order served the west Atlanta community across those seven decades. Among them, Fathers Melvin Shorter and Michael Greene became the first African American pastor and assistant at any Passionist parish in the United States, a distinction the order’s own historians cite specifically.

The parochial school ran from 1957 to 1990, its graduates among the first African Americans to enter Atlanta Catholic high schools and the University of Georgia. After the school closed, the parish redirected that energy into community programs: health clinics staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses, food drives, Boy and Girl Scout programs, and the annual AIDS Walk. In 1981, the campus hosted Camp Promise, organized as a gathering place for children of families shaken by the wave of missing and murdered children cases that ran across Atlanta’s west side from 1979 to 1981.

By 1999, the congregation had grown to roughly 700 families, making it Atlanta’s largest majority-African American Catholic community. In the late 1990s, the Passionists extended their outreach to Spanish-speaking Catholics in the archdiocese, and the congregation became bilingual and multiethnic. In his announcement, Archbishop Hartmayer named the departing clergy individually, thanking Father Patrick Daugherty, CP, and Father Luis Lopez Galarza, CP, by name for “their lasting commitment to the parish.”

Who Leads the West Atlanta Parish Next?

Father Israel J. Rodriguez arrives with a background rooted in immigrant and working-class Catholic communities in Massachusetts. Originally from Granada, Spain, he was ordained on May 23, 2009, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston by Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley. The ordination made him the first priest to graduate from the Redemptoris Mater Archdiocesan Missionary House of Formation in Boston, a seminary built on the principles of the Neocatechumenal Way, a Catholic renewal movement that originated in 1960s Madrid. The movement trains priests in a pastoral style centered on small itinerant communities, post-baptismal catechesis, and a missionary readiness to go wherever the local church directs.

His years in Boston included parish work at St. Mary of the Assumption in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a predominantly Latino community. In June 2024, he participated in the Redemptoris Mater Seminary’s groundbreaking ceremony in Chestnut Hill, recognized alongside Cardinal O’Malley as the founding class’s first priest, a distinction that reflects his historical significance to that formation tradition.

The archdiocese announcement identifies him as “a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston,” the canonical shorthand for inter-diocesan assignment. Formal incardination into Atlanta, which would transfer his canonical standing permanently, would be a separate step the announcement does not mention.

The community he’s entering was shaped by the Passionists’ charism for the entirety of its existence. Passionist spirituality centers on sustained presence and community formation around the memory of Christ’s Passion, with a historical commitment to marginalized communities. The Neocatechumenal Way’s pastoral grammar runs differently, emphasizing missionary mobility and small-group catechetical formation. What the transition means in practice for a bilingual, multi-generational congregation with seven decades of a single order’s pastoral tradition is the open question the west Atlanta parish carries into July.

Specialized Placements in the Second Round

Four appointments in the round address specific ministry needs across the archdiocese:

• Campus ministry: Father Bradley Starr takes up residence at the Emory University Catholic Campus Ministry Rectory, providing pastoral backup to Father Branson Hipp, who was placed as active campus minister for Emory, Emory/Oxford College, and Agnes Scott College in the first round.
• Vietnamese apostolate: Father Dominic Tran’s administrator posting at Our Lady of La Vang Mission in Marietta adds Vietnamese-speaking pastoral leadership to a growing northern suburban community.
• Haitian pastoral care: Father Carl Jean’s residential posting at Our Lady of Lourdes Rectory places his ongoing Haitian Catholic chaplaincy inside a formal archdiocesan residential structure while leaving the ministry itself unchanged.
• Seminary formation: Father Ben Thomsen joins the Notre Dame Seminary faculty in New Orleans, embedding archdiocesan expertise in a regional formation institution that trains priests for dioceses across the South.

Father Abel Guerrero Orta rounds out the announcement with a parochial vicar posting at St. Andrew Church in Roswell, adding staff to one of the archdiocese’s larger north Atlanta suburban parishes.

The 2026 Cycle in Context

The second round is narrower than the first, which moved more than a dozen priests, retired two senior clergy, and formally assigned four newly ordained men from the May 30 ordination class to their initial postings. Both rounds reflect the archdiocese’s continuing pattern of drawing priests from outside Georgia: the first brought Father Nestor Yulfo-Hoffman from the Archdiocese of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to administer St. Michael Church in Gainesville, and the second adds Father Rodriguez from Boston to a parish the Passionists had staffed since its founding.

At the March 31 Chrism Mass, Archbishop Hartmayer told the assembled clergy that 3,442 people would enter the Catholic Church in the archdiocese that Easter, a figure he called “an extraordinary sign that the Holy Spirit is at work.” The assignment cycles that follow such growth carry practical weight. Full details of the first round are in the Archdiocese of Atlanta’s 2026 priest assignment announcement, published May 19. With the Passionists’ departure from their founding parish in west Atlanta, the religious order contingent within a clergy roster of 310 active priests loses one of its longest-running assignments in the city. All second-round appointments take effect July 1.