The Catholic world and Christ-centered life of Flannery O’Connor

Wherever American author Flannery O’Connor lived during her 39 years, she was seldom far from a Catholic church – and very much immersed in the sacramental life. Born in Savannah, Georgia, she grew up practically in the shadow of that city’s Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. During a brief stay in Atlanta, Flannery and her family attended Christ the King Cathedral. While studying in the Midwest, she found a place to live not far from St. Mary’s in Iowa City, where she was a regular Mass-goer. And while living with friends in Connecticut, trying to establish a career in writing, she began each day attending Mass.

But her longest affiliation with any particular church was during her years in Milledgeville, the pre-Civil War capital of Georgia. It was while living at Andalusia, the family farm – and attending daily Mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church – that O’Connor wrote most of her novels and short stories. 

The pew where Flannery and her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, sat and the Communion rail where they knelt are still in place in the small brick church. So is Flannery O’Connor Hall, next door. The social hall was built in the mid-1950s and was renamed for the author in 1985.

In some respects, the entire parish could be named for O’Connor and her family, as so much of its history depended on them. 

The family's history in Georgia goes back to the late 18th century, when the state expanded religious freedom to Catholics. A group of Catholics from Maryland, escaping economic hardship there, settled in an area called Locust Grove, about an hour to the northeast of Milledgeville. 

“Some of her ancestors were part of that community,” Fr. Kuhr said. “As the capital was being moved West, Catholics also started to move out.”

The first Catholic resident of Milledgeville was Hugh Donnelly Treanor, Flannery O’Connor’s great-grandfather. It was in his room in the Newell Hotel that the city's first Catholic Mass on record was celebrated, in April 1845.

When the state legislature voted to move the capital to Atlanta in 1868, local businesses in Milledgeville suffered. A March 25, 1871, editorial in a local newspaper, The Union Recorder, encouraged the building of a Catholic church so that “desirable immigrants” might settle here. “Many of the best mechanics and most useful citizens from abroad are Catholic,” the newspaper said.

Coincidentally, the date of the editorial, the feast of the Annunciation, would turn out to be the birthday – in 1925 – of Mary Flannery O’Connor.

On March 30, 1873, a meeting of Milledgeville Catholics and other interested citizens was called with Flannery’s grandfather, Peter James Cline, presiding. The construction of a church was discussed and approved. The following month, according to The Union Recorder, advertisements for bids were issued, and a firm from Augusta was awarded the contract. Flannery’s great-grandmother, Joanna Treanor, paid for the land. 

For many years, Sacred Heart was the center of missionary activity, sending priests to communities throughout central Georgia.

The Treanors donated the high altar in Sacred Heart in the 1890s. 

Like many Catholics, Flannery O’Connor sometimes augmented her daily spiritual life with an occasional retreat. In letters to a correspondent, she writes of visits to the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, according to the Georgia Bulletin.

In an interview with Aleteia in early 2025, Trappist Fr. Methodius Telnack, who entered that monastery in 1949, remembered O’Connor's visits. He said that she first came to Holy Spirit with Catholic author Walker Percy and was interested in the monastery’s production of bonsai plants.

O’Connor and her family very much wanted that Sacred Heart Church carry on long after they departed from this world. Flannery died in 1964 and Regina in 1995. In 2009, Regina’s estate directed that the Flannery O’Connor Trust be established to preserve and maintain Sacred Heart, even if congregational growth were to force the parish to move to a larger church.

According to Basilio, it was Flannery herself who wanted to leave such a legacy. But even before that, the writer established a spiritual legacy for herself. According to Lorraine Murray, author of The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O'Connor's Spiritual Journey, “Flannery bequeathed the sum of $500 to her mother, Regina, to ensure that Masses would be celebrated for her after her death.”

Visitors to Andalusia will certainly notice artifacts attesting to Flannery O’Connor’s deep interest in the Catholic faith: In her bedroom there are books of theology, spirituality, and liturgy. 

But it’s at Sacred Heart, a 10-minute drive from Andalusia, where one finds what was most important to Flannery O’Connor. Brother John Albert, OCSO, a monk from the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, once wrote that Andalusia, “provided her the solitude in which to meditate on the great mysteries of our faith and to fashion her provocative fiction.” But Sacred Heart Church “was the spiritual ‘country’ that gave her the concrete particulars of her Roman Catholic tradition which she made more believable to others.”

When Atlanta Archbishop Gregory John Hartmeyer celebrated Mass for Sacred Heart’s 150th anniversary in 2024, he said Flannery “understood well the meaning of God’s love and mercy as she prayed in these very pews.”