The following is excerpted from the talk presented by Father Frank Ruff, president of Glenmary Home Missioners, at the symposium, “Mission 2009, The Birthday of the Church Among Southern Peoples,” held Aug. 8-10 at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky.

We are like a Mississippi farmer whose family has been raising cotton for 50 years. He knows how to raise cotton. But the market is changing. Labor is not so plentiful or so cheap. He is no longer so sure of the pesticides he has been using. He wonders why people don’t value cotton as much as he does. He needs help to plan for the future.

Glenmary has been doing home mission work in the rural South and Appalachia for the past 50 years. We have experience. But the Church has changed. Society has changed. The labor pool is different. Protestants are teammates rather than opponents in the Christian struggle against evil. The cultural differences are greater than we realized. We need help to know how to be true to ourselves, to the people of the home missions, and to the larger Church.

When Glenmary began, it was in response to a clear and definite need. Father William Howard Bishop, our founder, did some basic research and identified more than 1,000 counties in the United States without a resident priest. Most of these counties were in the South from Texas to the Atlantic. One-third of the counties in the United States had no resident Catholic minister and probably a fourth had no Catholic presence of any kind. The 1,000 counties he identified would have made a country as large as Mexico with as many people as Canada. They were neglected by our educational systems of our country as well.

Father Bishop’s plan, written in 1936, proposed, “the establishment of a religious society to labor for the conversion of America to the Church of Jesus Christ with the same earnestness and determination as foreign missionary societies are laboring for the conversion of the people of foreign lands.”

He was not interested in simply serving the scattered Catholics of the South. He was aware that in the past priests, Brothers and sisters had concentrated on protecting the faith of Catholics and bringing back fallen-aways.

The most common job description for church workers was, and often still is, to serve Catholics, no matter how many or how few there were.

Father Bishop respected these church workers, but contended that we would not do our best job if we simply cared for Catholics. We had to develop a “widespread, determined and persevering” program to win new conversions. He wrote, “the Church can never rise to its full stature as a spiritual force even in the lives of Catholics themselves until not only priests and bishops, but the rank and file of the faithful come to the realization that we are a missionary church, founded by Christ to preach and teach the Gospel to every creature and to bring all to follow in his steps.”

His understanding of missionary was always one who reached beyond simply serving Catholics.

At first his focus was primarily on convert-making. But in a letter to Glenmary Missioners in 1952, a year before he died, he expanded their job description. He acknowledged that, “we are all at work trying to bring into the church of Christ as many converts as we can… We know the satisfaction that comes to one who finds, instructs and baptizes neophytes. But on the other hand we may well ask ourselves, is convert making our only duty? The work of making converts is, of course, the missioner’s primary object. But I am convinced that side-by-side with the great convert-making purpose there is another objective for us to cherish and to pursue. That objective is to lift up and improve the moral lives of the people around us regardless of their beliefs or lack of beliefs; regardless, even whether they will ever accept the faith or not.”

To ensure the missionary thrust of Glenmary, he called for Glenmary to leave a territory when it was developed. He wrote in the original plan, “as soon as an area allotted by an ordinary to the society is sufficiently developed to be no longer missionary territory, it should be turned over to the diocesan clergy” and Glenmary Missioners “would move on to a new frontier.”

We have stayed in the rural South and have made it our home. We have lived and worked only in areas where Catholics were less than about 1 percent of the population.

We are currently doing missionary work in 15 dioceses from West Virginia to Texas. And, I am proud of Glenmary Missioners – priests, Brothers and Sisters, and those who minister with us. Despite the difficulties they have stayed in the trenches. They have not put their hand to the plow and turned back, despite the fact that the ground is sometimes rocky and hard. I know that some of you have been inspired by them and their fidelity.

Also, we have continued Father Bishop’s voice calling from the cotton fields of the South and the coal fields of Appalachia to the rest of the American Catholic Church. We have continued to remind the American Catholic Church that there is a true missionary need in the United States. We have reminded them that most of Africa is ten times more Catholic than the rural South. And we have rejoiced that many diocesan priests, many priests and Brothers of other religious communities, and many, many Sisters have come into the home missions.

So the good news is that we have stayed in the rural home missions close to the people. Glenmary Missioners have stood with the poor and against racial and economic injustice. We have built bridges to Protestant churches. We have touched and been touched by the people of the rural South. And, more good news is that many other missioners have joined the effort. The bad news is that we do not do cross-cultural evangelization well. We generally feel at home in a small county seat town and relate rather well to a small Catholic congregation, which often consists mostly of northern transplants. But we do not know how to reach the native born Appalachian, the indigenous African-American community, or the rural native born White Southerner, let alone the native Americans or Hispanics. It is a generalization, but it is generally true that our missionary work, whether in parishes or other ministry settings, stumbles on the rocks of cross-cultural evangelization.

We recognize that even after all these years, our ability to adapt to the rural south and its culture, is limited. Native born Appalachian people often do not feel at home in our churches. Even when they do join, they drift away rather quickly. The same is true for the African-American who joins our predominately white churches.

In all honesty, we do not feel particularly at home ourselves with some of the religious symbols of the rural South. For example, we are more comfortable with “Glory and Praise” hymns than with Country Gospel or Soul Gospel. We do not know the spiritual hungers and dreams of the unchurched. So, we do not know how to express our faith tradition in a language that speaks to those longings. I told you we needed help.

The poor have had a special claim on us, but more often we do for the poor rather than with the poor. We have had more experience staying in control of ministry than sharing it. We need help.

I believe that we home missioners need a vision of the Catholic Church in the South and the South – one that comes to birth from the southern culture. We need to know how to evangelize cross-culturally.

One final question for us. The role of Glenmary from the beginning has been to be a voice pointing out the home mission need and asking for a response. The home missions are bigger than Glenmary. In many ways we are rather insignificant. But we can be a voice for those who have no voice in the Catholic Church. A need I want to voice on behalf of those who have no voice is the fact that there are 155 counties in the rural South in which there is still no Catholic presence of any kind – no faith community, no Catholic worship, no Catholic minister. This has been true in most of these counties, since the founding of the country. These counties are larger than the states of Ohio and Indiana combined and larger than all of New England. More than 2,000,000 people live there. How are we, the American Catholic Church, going to respond to them? We need your help here, too.