Making Your Commitment
Begin by prayerfully considering how your regular giving might be expanded over and above your usual offering.
This giving table can help you plan your expanded giving if you prefer to think in weekly, monthly, or annual amounts.
Multiply that expanded amount by three years and write the total on the first line of the card.
Use the second line to indicate any additional gifts you intend to make from stored resources such as savings, an IRA, stock, or property.
Add both lines together to show your total three-year commitment.
*For Online Giving: a processing fee will be added to your payment: 3.45% for credit card or 0.4% for electronic check.
St. Anthony Catholic Church is launching a capital campaign to strengthen our parish home - addressing our most immediate needs for hospitality, accessibility, and gathering so parish life can flourish beyond the walls of the sanctuary.
Over the next three years, our parish will move forward together in a $2.9 million campaign, and we invite you to prayerfully walk with us in this season.
A Letter from Fr. José Luis
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
For more than 85 years, St. Anthony Catholic Church has been a spiritual home where generations have encountered Christ, celebrated the sacraments, grown in faith, and found a family in the Church. We have inherited a beautiful and sacred place, entrusted to us by those who came before.
Today, our parish continues to grow. We worship in different languages and come from different backgrounds and generations, yet we are one parish family, united by one faith and one mission.
However, growth has also revealed the limits of a church built for a different time. Limited seating, inadequate restrooms, difficult access for some of our elderly and those with limited mobility, no dedicated cry room for young families, and insufficient space for confession, ministry, and fellowship.
Growing Together - Creciendo Juntos is our opportunity to respond. Through this $2.9 million campaign, we will improve our parish home while preserving the beauty, reverence, and sacred character of our church. More than adding space, we are building a more welcoming, accessible parish where everyone can encounter Christ and participate fully in the life of our community.
I ask each family to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to participate. We are not asked to make equal gifts, but each of us can make a prayerful and sacrificial response according to how we have been blessed. Those who came before us sacrificed so that St. Anthony could become the parish we cherish today. Now it is our turn to care for what we have received and prepare it for our children, our grandchildren, and the generations still to come.
May St. Anthony intercede for us, and may God bless our parish as we continue growing together.
With gratitude and prayers,
Fr. José Luis Vidarte.
WE ARE St. Anthony Catholic Church
For more than 85 years, St. Anthony Catholic Church has been a sacred refuge in Longview. As the oldest parish in Gregg County, we have helped establish three other churches and formed countless families in the Catholic faith. As a church community, we are more than a collection of individuals,
we are a family united by shared faith and experience.
From longtime parishioners to young families with little ones, St. Anthony’s has always been home to families of all ages.
Stepping into St. Anthony’s feels like stepping back in time - ornate, reverent, and peaceful. In today’s fast-paced world, it offers the quiet and stillness for which so many hearts are searching. It is the parish that “feels like church” - holy and timeless in its devotion to Christ and His Church.
St. Anthony’s has also been entrusted with one of the Church’s most sacred responsibilities: forming future priests. The Diocese sends seminarians here to learn, grow, and experience what their ministry vocation will look like. We are proud to play an active role in forming the next generation of Catholic leaders.
The real beauty of St. Anthony’s has always been that everyone belongs here. Our parish is active and alive, with new families continuing to find a spiritual home among us. While we worship in different languages, we share one parish, one faith, and one mission. We come together through parish traditions, formation, and life beyond the walls of the sanctuary. It is a quiet, beautiful picture of God’s Kingdom at work.
And yet, as our parish family has grown, we’ve begun to feel the limits of this beloved space - not in faith, but in the practical ways families worship and gather together.
The Problem:
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The building that has served St. Anthony’s faithfully for decades was designed for a different time. While the sanctuary itself remains a sacred and beautiful place of worship, the surrounding spaces were never intended to support the needs of today’s multigenerational parish family.
For many parishioners, those limitations show up in very real ways. It is now common for three generations of one family to worship in three different places on a given weekend: grandparents attending where accessibility is easier, parents worshipping at St. Anthony’s, and young families going to other churches where cry rooms, changing tables, and privacy are available.
This scattering is not a reflection of divided faith. It is the result of practical constraints—restrooms located beside the altar, limited accessibility, lack of private spaces for families, and no covered outdoor space where parishioners can comfortably gather before and after Mass. These are simple, practical issues, but they carry deep spiritual weight.
This project is not about expanding the sanctuary for increased seating. It is about addressing the practical limitations that prevent our parish from fully living its mission of hospitality, dignity, and care for all ages.
Lack of adequate seating during Sunday Mass often leads to crowded aisles and standing room only, especially during special events, feast days and during the Advent and Lenten seasons when our parish gathers in greater numbers.
Steep steps and distant parking make it difficult for older members or those with limited mobility to attend.
Limited access means sacred moments like funerals have become difficult, as caskets must be carried up and down many steps - a harsh reality forcing families to say goodbye in another parish under unfamiliar priests.
Only one small restroom, located beside the altar, regularly prompts a quiet (or not so quiet!) line to form during Mass, breaking the reverent spirit of worship. Those needing accessible facilities currently must choose another church.
The lack of a cry room and changing tables leaves young parents anxious. They opt to stay home altogether or attend mass at one of our sister churches.
A single confessional, located beside the restroom, does not offer the privacy this sacred sacrament deserves.
No covered outdoor area means that during Longview’s intense summer heat, or inclement weather, fellowship ends quickly, and families rush to their cars instead of visiting before and after Masses.