Religion

St. Paul's Parish is a bedroom community outside the greater historic city of Charleston, South Carolina. The parish is comprised of a series of small, close-knit communities, including Meggett, Yonges Island, Hollywood, Rantowles, Ravenel, and Adams Run. Over the years, it has been a site of key Revolutionary War battles, a mobilization point for Confederate forces, a summer vacation spot for Charlestonians, home of South Carolina's second oldest settlement, and, most importantly, an area dominated by agriculture and industry. The entire parish has been dependent on agriculture since the first settlers arrived. By the early 1900s, St. Paul's Parish had become a vegetable-growing super center that surpassed many larger cities and towns across the United States. At one point in time, Meggett was the cabbage capital of the world! Truck farming, as it was known, made the "Cabbage Patch" and its citizens world-famous and rich until the 1950s; it started to slowly decline and came to a halt in the early 1960s.

In 1820, the Catholic Diocese of Charleston was established, and Bishop John England arrived from Ireland. His new diocese encompassed North and South Carolina, Georgia and, for a time, Haiti. From 1859 to 1885, when Patrick Lynch and Henry Northrop were bishops of Charleston, the diocese included the Bahama Islands. However, the history of Catholics in the diocese--which now covers all of South Carolina--began much earlier. The arrival of Spanish settlers and missionary priests dated back more than 150 years before there was a diocese on American soil. Sister Pam Smith charts the history of the diocese from the first words of prayer uttered on Santa Elena in the sixteenth century through the interfaith singing of a reformed slaveholder's hymn at a painful funeral in the twenty-first century.