ANALYSIS: When the Community Boiled Over, Two Parties Started Talking
The conflict over a special use permit in 2023 elevated tensions between St. Mary's and the College Heights community. A dialog between Sue Sargeant and Chris Lanzarone helped calm the situation.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The little church that has sat atop the rise on William Street since 1971 is not so little anymore. A fact that those who live in the College Heights neighborhood have long known.
Whether because of complaints about traffic and parking, or charges that St. Mary’s has become a “megachurch” that has outgrown its space in the community, tensions between the two had been building in recent years. It broke last year over a debate about awarding a Special Use Permit to the church.
Since then, however, things have settled down. Not because the SUP was approved and people just gave up — traffic remains an issue, and the church continues to deal with the challenges that growth brings — but rather because two individuals have worked diligently to improve communication between the church and the neighborhood.
“One of the things that we [have] really [tried] to improve on is communication,” says St. Mary’s operations manager Chris Lanzarone.
And that improvement has happened in no small part thanks to a discussion that developed in the midst of the SUP crisis between himself and the president of the College Heights Neighborhood Association, Sue Sargeant.
A longtime resident of College Heights, Sargeant was named head of the association in January 2023. She assumed the role from the outgoing president, who had moved away, in an effort to “keep the neighborhood association from folding,” she told the Advance.
Unbeknownst to Sargeant was that her predecessor’s leaving would set in motion much of the misunderstanding that later occurred between the church and the neighborhood and ignited the battle over the special use permit that erupted last spring.
In an exclusive interview with the Advance in September, Lanzarone said that the house the church acquired on Royston Street that started the debate over the SUP happened innocently enough. The woman who owned the house was moving into a care facility, he said, and her daughter, who was a realtor, “approached [St. Mary’s] and said [they’d be] interested in selling the house if the church would offer a fair price.”
An appraiser was brought in and an offer was extended that the owner accepted. Lanzarone said that the church then “called the prior head of the civic association and told her [the diocese was] going to buy this house and use it for bible study.”
She responded “OK,” but did say “that people wouldn’t like it.”
Lanzarone assumed that the information was passed on to association homeowners. So he was surprised that after the church moved forward with the renovation and rezoning of the property “the neighborhood seemed shocked.” Lanzarone speculates that in the business of preparing to move, the previous head of the association simply forgot to pass along the information.
“Whatever happened,” he said, “things got a little heated.”
First Steps to Conversation
Sargeant was unaware of the purchase when she took control. It wasn’t until April 6, she told the Advance, at a UMW Town and Gown Committee meeting that she became aware of the issue. “This was the first time that I heard about it.”
Of particular concern were a series of gates that had been proposed. Some in the College Heights community saw this as an effort to create a gated community.
Sargeant’s first move was to set up a meeting with the city’s zoning administrator, Kelly Machen, who proved “very helpful,” according to Sargeant.
In those discussions, she learned that rather than an effort to create a gated community, the gates that had been proposed were being erected to encourage people to park in the church parking lot and not in the driveways of houses, which would have worsened traffic conditions.
“This was [St. Mary’s] way to be helpful,” Sargeant told the Advance. “What the community saw was an effort to create a gated community.”
At the same time that Sargeant was talking with Machen, she also opened up an email conversation with Lanzarone.
In May, Sargeant and Lanzarone, as well as a local resident and another association Board member, sat down to discuss the parking situation.
At issue was people arriving at the last minute for services, when there’s no parking left in the parking lot and the spaces in front of the church are taken. People would then park on Buckner Street and push into Rappahannock Avenue.
“We agreed,” Sargeant told the Advance, “that people committing these parking violations may not have known English, because the violations were occurring during the Spanish masses. So we asked Chris to print something in the bulletin or have someone who speaks Spanish to get the word out about parking between the signs and not extending out beyond the signs.”
Since that time, Sargeant says, the issue has largely been resolved.
Relations were further improved following the SUP’s being passed in September 2023. Residents had become concerned about the sidewalks the SUP would allow to be built. The concern was that these sidewalks would become throughways to the neighborhood.
Sargeant told the Advance that Lanzarone “took me on a tour … of the houses and what the sidewalks were going to look like. It’s just sidewalks to get to the ministries that will help walkers.” The problem for the residents was that “you can’t see [this] from the street.”
To solve that problem, Sargeant “took the board on a walking tour of the property, doing the same tour as [Lanzarone had done] so that the board could see what was happening.”
The dialog didn’t just work in one direction, however.
“We had meetings with Sue and other members of the community,” Lanzarone told the Advance. “We found out that there was a lot of misinformation about the church and the ways the property was acquired.” The church was able to show, for example, that the land it was on was gifted to the church in 1968, putting an end to some of the more-damaging accusations that were flying around.
Knowing Your Neighbor
It would be a mistake to think that the conversations between Lanzarone and Sargeant have always been easy.
“Sue and I have … had some tough, but fair, conversations,” Lanzarone said.
But what both parties have learned is the importance of connecting not only with one another, but with those on the periphery of the issue.
For Sargeant, that meant spending time with the planning commission and understanding the technical language involved in the church’s SUP application. The language, she notes, isn’t easy or intuitive. Those conversations, however, were productive and ultimately helped improve relationships with the church.
For Lanzarone, that meant appreciating the importance of helping the community better understand the role St. Mary’s plays in the Fredericksburg community and the steps they’ve taken over several decades to deal with a growing community of worshipers at St. Mary’s.
“The big thing is opening avenues of communication,” Lanzarone continued. “Neighbors [in College Heights] know that if they tell Sue, it will get back to the church. And we have someone we can communicate with to get information to the neighbors.”
Consequently, Lanzarone has also been able to help people better understand the Catholic community.
“We want people to know that we’re not some megachurch of outsiders who have suddenly taken over College Heights,” he told the Advance. “We are neighbors, are a part of Fredericksburg, we contribute to the community. We want to continue being a part of the community of caring.”
One of the more important steps in helping people understand that is educating them about the structure of the church itself.
“If you’re not part of the Catholic church,” he told the Advance, “one thing you may not understand is the concept of the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. We’re part of a bigger, universal church,” and St. Mary’s is a member of the Diocese of Arlington. “Our community doesn’t select the priests; the bishop sends them.” And the “bishop is responsible for the care for the diocese.”
That plays out in ways big and small. Consider the parking issue, which was a flashpoint in the SUP proposal.
Lanzarone hears from some that the church isn’t trying to address this, but in fact the Diocese of Arlington has been aware of and working to address this issue for some time.
“Since 1986,” Lanzarone said, the Diocese of Arlington has “added four other churches in the Fredericksburg area for Catholics to attend that were geographically broken off from St. Mary’s. So you have St. Patrick’s, St. Jude, St. Matthews, and St. Anthony’s in King George.”
These churches have been added to reduce the pressure on St. Mary’s. “But,” Lanzarone said, “the area keeps growing.”
Additional steps that St. Mary’s has taken to ease traffic include adding a second 10:30 AM mass — the most popular — “at Holy Cross Academy on Route 17 in Stafford. We get 400 to 500 people there each Sunday. We’ve also added an 8:30 mass at Holy Cross,” Lanzarone said.
The Synergy of Church and City
Though the association and the church have traveled some rough waters over the past year, that has led to people better understanding what St. Mary’s does for the city of Fredericksburg.
“We are one of the founding churches of Micah,” said Lanzarone, and actively involved in helping with homeless centers, cold shelter nights, and more.
The church’s involvement doesn’t stop there. An example is the coat drive where they turn the Parish Hall into a giant closet for a weekend and anyone can come in and take a coat. Recently, Catholic Charities sent the Fredericksburg area 1,000 winter coats.
In addition to this, St. Mary’s has contributed:
$21,000 each to Micah Ministries and to Mary’s Shelter
$19,000 to Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank
$16,500 to St Vincent de Paul
$7,000 to local food banks
$6,000 to Birthright
and $5,000 to a local homeless shelter
And this represents just a sampling of what St. Mary’s and the diocese have done.
To know this, however, “requires you getting to know us,” said Lanzarone. And “we have to do a better job helping people get to know us.”
In a city dealing with extreme growing pains, a rapidly diversifying population, and growing gaps in income and housing and career opportunities, the story of how St. Mary’s and the College Heights neighborhood association have used honest discussion and a readiness to listen to one another should both inspire and motivate.
And it serves as a powerful reminder that the solution to every problem we face begins with conversation — no matter how difficult those first intrepid steps may be.
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