Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy received a Southern Maryland welcome as he celebrated Mass at St. John Francis Regis Parish in Hollywood, Maryland on March 8, with a welcome sign greeting him in the driveway, and with the church filled with hundreds of parishioners, including many young families with children, who also attended a reception afterward to meet the cardinal.
The cardinal’s Mass there came during his week of visits to 14 St. Mary’s County parishes between March 5 and 11, beginning his pastoral visits in the Archdiocese of Washington in the region where Jesuit Father Andrew White celebrated the first Mass in the English-speaking colonies at St. Clement’s Island with settlers arriving in Maryland on March 25, 1634, which is now commemorated annually as Maryland Day.
“What better place to start, than where the colonists started, in St. Mary’s County,” said Cardinal McElroy.
After his installation as the new archbishop of Washington one year ago on March 11, 2025, the cardinal first met with priests and joined listening session with parish lay leaders across Washington, D.C., and the five surrounding Maryland counties that are part of the archdiocese before beginning a series of parish visits.
Those meetings and consultations resulted in six goals for pastoral action in the Archdiocese of Washington, which include helping parishes invite people to a personal encounter with Jesus, providing formation that deepens sacramental life, celebrating marriage and family life, forming the laity as missionary disciples, caring for those in need, and reversing the exodus of young people leaving the Church.
Cardinal McElroy’s Mass at St. John Francis Regis was celebrated on the third Sunday of Lent, and the concelebrants included Father Raymond Schmidt, the pastor, and Father Ryan Braam, the parish’s parochial vicar. St. John Francis Regis is named for a 17th century French saint and evangelist who was known as a humble country priest devoted to the Eucharist. The rural Maryland parish was founded in 1690 and marked its 300th anniversary in 1990. The current church was dedicated in 1898.
In his homily, the cardinal emphasized that the cross is “the symbol of Christ’s limitless love for us,” and “that in our times of suffering, Jesus is there with us, and knows what suffering is,” because Jesus experienced spiritual, physical and emotional suffering.
The Gospel reading from John 4:5-42 told the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, and one of the prayers of the faithful was for the Church to reach out to separated and divorced people, just as Jesus reacted with compassion to the woman at the well.
The Mass was held eight days after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran, and as Iran launched counter-attacks on several Middle Eastern countries and the war spread into Lebanon. A prayer was offered for the safety of men and women serving in the military, and “that warfare will quickly cease in Iran.”
As the Mass was ending, Cardinal McElroy thanked the parish for fostering vocations to the priesthood, including seven current seminarians for the Archdiocese of Washington, and he said, “I pray this Lent will be one where you encounter the Lord ever more deeply.”
The archdiocese’s seminarians from St. John Francis Regis Parish include Deacon Jessiah Rojas, Peter Trossbach, Joseph Stanalonis, Dylan Young, Logan Dill, James Parker and Austin Russell. Nicholas Labaza from the parish is studying to be a Trappist monk.
Also before the Mass ended, Father Schmidt invited people to join a luncheon reception with the cardinal afterward, and he joked about the irony of a parish talk the next day by Deacon Ken Scheiber on fasting.
The reception was held in the parish hall, the Msgr. Harris Center, which is named for Msgr. Martin Harris, who served as St. John’s pastor for 34 years, from 1970 until his retirement in 2004. A parish history notes that over the years he often acted “as St. John’s sole carpenter, plumber, electrician and janitor.” The center, located between the church and St. John’s School, was dedicated in his honor in 2006. He died in 2016 at the age of 92.
Father Schmidt, who succeeded him as pastor and has led the parish for the past 22 years, said in an interview that “continuity and stability makes a difference” in parish leadership.
Commenting on the vocations originating in the parish, Father Schmidt said, “Vocations keep coming in a way that’s quasi-miraculous.”
He noted that St. John’s Summer Program, which the parish bulletin described as “Southern Maryland’s largest summer camp,” has inspired children and the teens and young adults mentoring them to deepen their faith. Several of the young men now studying to be priests and several priests recently ordained for the archdiocese once served at the camp, and some of them attended nearby St. Mary’s Ryken High School in Leonardtown.
Their experiences at the parish and school “just seem to have a way of opening their hearts to hear the Lord’s voice,” the priest said.
The St. John’s Summer Program, in addition to including fun camp activities, also includes daily Mass, theology classes and Eucharistic Adoration. The program began 16 years ago.
“I hire 80 people every summer who have a missionary spirit,” said Father Schmidt, who said the young people serving at the camp come from across the United States, and they evangelize the 300 campers between the ages of 4 and 14 attending the camp during its eight-week program in the summer.
He noted that the parish also has a Regina Guild for girls who are open to religious life, and a Regis Guild for boys who are open to considering the priesthood.
St. John Francis Regis Parish includes 1,200 families and households, and Father Schmidt said parishioners include families with roots in farming tobacco or harvesting oysters and also newer families from across the country working as professionals in fields including engineering jobs or as contractors at the nearby Naval Air Station Patuxent River, bringing “excitement and vitality” to the parish.
The priest said he hopes that Cardinal McElroy’s visit to parishes in St. Mary’s County will be a grace-filled encounter, opening his heart to the Catholics there, and opening their hearts to him.
Susan McDonough, the principal of St. John’s School since 2012 wh0 began teaching there in 2001, reflected on the faith of Catholics in her home county. She grew up at Our Lady’s Church at Medley’s Neck and now is a member of Immaculate Conception Parish in Mechanicsville. Her school, which marked its 100th anniversary in 2023, now has 218 students in pre-kindergarten to the eighth grade.
“I feel this is truly a faith-filled place. It’s the birthplace of Catholicism” in the English colonies, McDonough said in an interview, noting that her seventh-great-grandfather is Cuthbert Fenwick, who was among the first settlers who arrived in Maryland on the Ark and the Dove ships almost four centuries ago.
Reflecting on St. Mary’s County, she said, “It is my home. It’s where my roots are. It’s where my love of my profession, my love for my faith came (from). This helped shape me into the person I am, the mother, wife, daughter, principal and teacher that I am.”
Rich Olon, who has served as the director of religious education and youth ministry at St. John’s and has led its summer program for the past 16 years, said the parish has “a really strong community,” led by Father Schmidt, who he praised as an “amazing priest. He’s been here, that makes a difference… He knows the families.”
Olon said the St. John’s Summer Program with its daily Mass, Adoration and theology classes has a structure that integrates faith and love for Christ with the recreational activities. A pool party might include praying the rosary, and a game of Ultimate Frisbee might include time for prayer, he said.
“We show them Christ should be a part of every aspect of their life,” Olon said, adding that the counselors and campers alike learn that “life gets better when they have moments with God throughout the day… Hopefully it will flow into the rest of their life.”
Olon noted that a number of Catholic marriages originated at the camp, with counselors who worked together as friends later falling in love and getting married.
He said that one “beautiful thing in the county” is how programs at parishes and schools and youth ministries are shared, bringing parishioners and students together. “There’s so much crossover,” he said.
The guests at the reception with Cardinal McElroy included Matthew Uzdavinis and his wife Maria, who met when they were serving as counselors at the St. John’s Summer Program. Matthew Uzdavinis, who is from Tampa, was attending Ave Maria University in Florida when his roommates, who had worked at the summer program, recruited him to work there.
“That’s where I met Maria,” he said, adding, “My experience at the summer program was such an awesome adventure. I loved every minute of it.”
Maria Uzdavinis, who is a year younger than her husband, later also attended Ave Maria University. She grew up at St. John’s Parish, attended the school there and over the years was a camper, volunteer and a counselor at the St. John’s Summer Program.
“I’ve been here my whole life,” she said, and then noted the impact of the summer program. “That’s really where I found my faith and made it my own. It was so cool to see other young people so involved in their faith.”
Now Matthew Uzdavinis works as the director of development for a non-profit, and Maria is a stay-at-home mom, expecting their first child.
Asked what they hoped that Cardinal McElroy’s takeaway will be from his visits to the parishes in St. Mary’s County, she said, “There’s a lot of young people here,” and her husband added that he hoped the cardinal would see “that the young Catholic families in St. Mary’s County love the Church, love our shepherds and really love our Catholic traditions, especially reverent liturgy.”
Also attending the reception for the cardinal were Lawrence and Sarah Forte, another young married couple who met while working at the St. John’s Summer Program. Lawrence Forte now works as a contractor at the Pax River Naval Air Station, and Sarah Forte works part-time as a special education teacher in the resource program at St. Mary’s Ryken High School, assisting students with learning disabilities and ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). They have three children, ages 5, 4 and 1.
Lawrence Forte said that when he started working at the summer program, he “met peers who took their faith seriously. It helped galvanize my faith, just the opportunity to work with kids and share my faith with them.”
His wife agreed with that point, saying, “It helped me take responsibility in an adult sense for other children, and take spiritual responsibility for myself, and making it my own faith.”
Sarah Forte grew up as a member of Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Lexington Park, and her husband grew up attending St. George Parish in Valley Lee. She noted that a lot of people in the parish and county have a connection to the St. John’s Summer Program.
After being friends and fellow counselors there, they later started dating.
“We were married at St. John’s, and our kids were baptized here. It’s definitely going to be our parish for life,” Lawrence Forte said, adding that now their two oldest children are participating in the summer program there.
When asked about the cardinal’s takeaway from his visits to St. Mary’s County parishes, Lawrence Forte said he hoped Washington’s archbishop would see “the vibrant life here, and (how) a lot of young families have stayed connected” to their faith.
Sarah Forte also emphasized “the young community down here,” and she added, “We’re just as much a part of our archdiocese as D.C. There’s a lot of us down here building a community.”
In addition to St. John Francis Regis Parish in Hollywood, the St. Mary’s County parishes visited by Cardinal McElroy included Immaculate Heart of Mary in Lexington Park, St. George in Valley Lee, St. Peter Claver in St. Inigoes, Immaculate Conception in Mechanicsville, Holy Face in Great Mills, St. Aloysius Gonzaga in Leonardtown, St. Michael’s in Ridge, Our Lady of the Wayside in Chaptico, Sacred Heart in Bushwood, Holy Angels in Avenue, St. Joseph in Morganza, Our Lady’s Church at Medley’s Neck in Leonardtown, and St. Francis Xavier in Newtowne.
He celebrated Masses at the churches, and Stations of the Cross during his visit to St. Peter Claver. The cardinal’s visits to Our Lady’s Church at Medley’s Neck and to St. Francis Xavier in Newtowne were on March 11, the one-year anniversary of when he was installed as the archbishop of Washington.
