In the cottage on the grounds of St. John Vianney Parish in Prince Frederick, Maryland, where Father Peter Alliata has lived since his retirement in 2010, large gold-colored balloons in the shape of the number 60 dangled from his rocking chair, one of the gifts from parishioners to congratulate him on his 60th anniversary, along with a print-out resembling a newspaper, with a headline reading “Father Pete celebrating 60 years!” and a photo of Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory congratulating him at a recent Mass for priest jubilarians.
That Calvert County parish, the priest said, has been a nice place to retire.
“The people are very friendly. They’d invite you over for meals,” said Father Alliata, who has spent about one-half of his six decades as a priest serving people in Southern Maryland parishes.
Asked what celebrating his 60th anniversary meant to him, the veteran priest said, “I really enjoyed being with the people. That’s what it was all about.”
The greatest blessing of his priesthood, he added, has been “the love of the community back and forth. You really got to meet people, being part of their lives.”
Father Alliata, who turned 86 in April, is a native of Washington, D.C., one of three children of the late Peter and Katherine Alliata, who were both immigrants.
“My father was from Italy, and my mother was from Ireland. My understanding was they met on a ship,” he said.
His father was a chef and worked at the British Embassy, at the Mayflower Hotel and at a French restaurant in Washington, and his mother worked as a housekeeper at various downtown hotels.
The future priest was baptized at Holy Rosary, the Italian parish in Washington, and later attended St. Joseph’s Home and School and St. Martin’s School in Washington. After he graduated from the eighth grade at St. Martin’s, the pastor there, Msgr. Louis Miltenberger, encouraged him to enter the seminary. After attending St. Charles College in Catonsville and St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, Father Alliata was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington in 1961 at St. Matthew’s Cathedral by then-Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle.
For his first five years as a priest, he served as an associate pastor at St. Matthias Parish in Lanham, then as an associate pastor at two Washington parishes, Assumption and St. Joseph on Capitol Hill. “You’re right near the Capitol,” he said of the latter parish assignment, and then joked, “To have a parking space near the Capitol, it’s like you’re a millionaire!”
Those first years of his priesthood coincided with the Second Vatican Council, and then the changes that it brought about, including Mass being celebrated in English and other local languages instead of Latin, and growing participation of the laity at Mass and in parish life.
“I liked the change,” Father Alliata said. “You just had more of a feeling of contact with the people out there.”
He was appointed in 1969 as an associate pastor at Sacred Heart Parish in Bowie, where he served for two years before serving in that role from 1971-74 at St. Nicholas in Laurel.
In 1974, Father Alliata was named as the pastor of Holy Angels in Avenue, beginning his many years of service in Southern Maryland. Holy Angels Church is located near St. Clement’s Island, where in 1634 Jesuit Father Andrew White celebrated the first Mass in the English-speaking colonies for colonists arriving from England on the ships the Ark and the Dove. While serving there, the priest became very interested in the region’s history and enjoyed visiting old manor houses, and he joined the St. Mary’s County Historical Society.
“We used to go out there (on St. Clement’s Island) on Maryland Day and celebrate Masses there,” said the priest, who also participated in the annual Blessing of the Fleet held at Colton’s Point each fall.
Father Alliata noted the dedication and faith of Holy Angels parishioners, who volunteered and prepared meals at two annual country dinners featuring country ham and oysters that drew guests from across the state and raised money for the parish and the now-closed Holy Angels-Sacred Heart School.
In 1979, the priest was appointed to study the possibility of establishing a new parish in the St. Charles City area of Charles County, and in 1980, Father Alliata became the founding pastor of Our Lady Help of Christians Parish in Waldorf, where he served until 1987.
The website of Our Lady Help of Christians Parish notes: “Those early years were formative of a wonderful ecumenical spirit that still exists. Knowing that we were a community without a home, the local churches opened their doors and invited us to share their facilities. We celebrated our Saturday evening Mass at Good Shepherd United Methodist Church for more than 10 years. The Peace Lutheran community presented us with a key to their front door for evening meetings, on a space available basis. We formally returned the keys to both churches in June 1990, when we completed construction of our church.”
Father Alliata served as the pastor of St. James Parish in Mount Rainier from 1987 to 2004, at a time when the parish had a growing Hispanic population. Then he returned to Southern Maryland as the pastor of Immaculate Conception in Mechanicsville from 2004 until 2010, when he retired.
Over the years, Father Alliata was very involved as a priest participating in weekend retreats for Worldwide Marriage Encounter and the Cursillo Movement, and he said he was inspired by the faith of the people he met in those activities. He has a Marriage Encounter frame for the license plate of his Ford Focus.
The veteran priest said he has appreciated the support that people have given him during his 60 years in that vocation.
“When you’re in a parish, you’re ministered to by the community. They share their joys with you,” he said.
Once, when a woman asked him what was his favorite parish over the years, he said his response was, “Whatever one I was in, because I really enjoyed just relating to the people.”
