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Until recently, North Carolina was the least Catholic state in the U.S. The first Tarheel priest was Father Thomas Frederick Price, ordained in 1886 in Wilmington, N.C. Father Price cofounded the Maryknoll Foreign Mission Society in 1911, and now he is on the potential path to sainthood.

My grandparents moved to Charlotte in 1907 as teenaged newlyweds, when it was a town of 20,000 people. They wanted to grow with it. St. Peter's was the only Catholic church in Charlotte.

When I was born in 1944, Charlotte was approaching 100,000 people, but the total Catholic population of the state in North Carolina was only 1.25 percent, or 13,000 Catholics out of 5 million Tarheels!

When the Diocese of Raleigh split in 1972 to create the Diocese of Charlotte, we had about 35,000 Catholics and the Diocese of Raleigh had 35,000 Catholics. Now St. Matthew Church has about 35,000 Catholics in just that one parish!

With all the Yankee Catholics moving south and Latino Catholics coming north, the Diocese of Charlotte might have about 300,000 Catholics at the present, a third of them in the city of Charlotte. The Charlotte Observer said a few years ago that Charlotte area Catholics are the largest group of Christians who attend church in Charlotte each Sunday – 70,000 Catholics – far outnumbering even Baptists and Methodists who are predominant all over North Carolina. We have come a long way! And we have only 11 Catholic parishes in Charlotte; 10 years ago we needed at least four more.

In a previous issue of the Catholic News Herald, there was a wonderful article about Ricky Kovacs, the music minister at St. Elizabeth of the Hill Country Church in Boone. He is working on his second master's degree in international politics and has been chosen for a Vatican internship at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This makes me very proud. Ricky is a respected lay Catholic from Asheville who will do great things for our Church and our world and who rejoices the heart of our good God, as he helps build the New Creation of our Lord Jesus on this earth!

And the best part is that Ricky is not the only Tarheel Catholic who is doing great things. My dear friend Dr. Maria Lichtman of Boone has also been invited to Indonesia to establish a new retreat house. And I am sure there are many more success stories in the Diocese of Charlotte that need to be shared.

We are coming of age, praise God!

Father John Vianney Hoover resides at New Creation Monastery in Charlotte.