By Jerome Ernst

Archbishop Hallinan has announced that Sunday, April 24, 1966, will be dedicated to the home missions and that, in order to further the cause of the home missions, EXTENSION Magazine will be sold throughout the archdiocese on that day.

Extension Society is the official Church organization for helping all missionary dioceses throughout the United States and its territories and dependencies. The major project of the organization is the dispensing of funds, raised through EXTENSION Magazine, for depressed and missionary areas assistance that has run into the tens of millions of dollars.

This year Extension is expected to help build about 100 mission churches to serve Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Indians, migratory workers, residents of Appalacia and others. The Society has helped build more than 7,000 churches in its 60 years’ existence.

Hundreds of seminarians will depend on Extension this year for all or part of their seminary expenses - future priests to serve in the no-priest areas of the United States, such as North Carolina which is less than 1 per cent Catholic (Tanganyika is 16 per cent Catholic); Georgia 1.75 per cent Catholic (the Congo is 33 per cent Catholic); Tennessee, 2 per cent Catholic (Ghana is 8.1 per cent Catholic); Oklahoma is 4 per cent Catholic (New Guinea is 14 per cent Catholic).

Hundreds of priests are also given monthly financial assistance in their mission work, part of it through Mass offerings.

Emergency aid is also given after such catastrophes as the Alaskan earthquake, a Louisiana hurricane, or a Minnesota flood - clothes and blankets, liturgical furnishings. Extension supplies there where needed.

The Society also operates the largest Catholic volunteer movement in the United States - the Extension Society Volunteers. Four hundred volunteers are working in the United States missions for a year or longer, most of them college graduates. Growth of the program is reflected in the fact that this year there are almost 100 more volunteers in the program than last year.

Volunteers from 96 dioceses are stationed in 164 mission spots in 31 dioceses. In the four years since the program began, well over 1,000 volunteers have been accepted as teachers, nurses, community workers, social workers, catechists and Newman center coordinators at secular universities. Assignments range from Appalachia west to Provo, Utah, south to Kiln, Mississippi, and down to Ponce, Puerto Rico.

One of the main instruments through which Society raises funds is EXTENSION Magazine. With a circulation of more than 375,000 it is the largest U.S. Catholic magazine of general subscription publishing original material.

Among promising developments for Extension Society’s future is an experiment involving sociological studies of a southwestern diocese. It is hoped that results of the study will contribute to development of a detailed pastoral plan for the diocese and also a workable scheme for assignment of diocesan clergy for maximum effectiveness.

These studies and the lay volunteer movement are indications of changes taking place in the Society to meet changing needs. All of this, of course, is in keeping with the spirit of the Vatican Council in its intention to bring the Church “up to date.” Part of the Society’s task is to make people aware of the fact that there are still mission needs in the United States. The Council Fathers have clearly insisted that we attend to mission needs in our own backyards. “The Church is missionary even where the faithful are in the majority,” one cardinal put it. Part of the future task of EXTENSION Magazine, is to promote a new notion of mission in line with this Vatican Council spirit.

Chicago’s Archbishop John P. Cody, chancellor of Extension Society, recently commented that “our vision of missionary needs must go beyond the diocesan borders and appreciate the great service which the Extension Society is rendering to the missionary dioceses in every part of the country. Without this aid hundreds of chapels would never have been erected and thousands of souls would have been left without the administration of the greatest activities of the movement.”