Brother Craig Digmann helps fix a leaking roof in Danville, Ark. Before he left Arkansas, Brother Craig received a key to the city and an official proclamation from the mayor of Waldron thanking him for all that he did there.

Brother Craig Digmann’s entire family—parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, and two adult sons—live in the eastern part of Iowa, within an hour’s drive from each other. Prior to the last three years, Brother Craig lived there too, working as a farmer, an entrepreneur designing and selling oak hog-feeders and most recently as a granite mason for a counter top manufacturer.

In 2005, this self-proclaimed jack-of-all trades (and master of none, he is quick to add) packed his bags, said goodbye to his family and began his journey to fulfill his call to service. He moved to Glenmary’s prenovitiate house in Hartford, Ky., hoping to one day use his skills as a Glenmary brother.

Fast forward to the summer months of June and July of 2008 and you might have found a wet Brother Craig aiming a powerful stream of water at the senior center in Mann, W.Va., as he power-washed it, preparing it for painting. “It’s a very dirty job,” he says, “but it takes the paint off pretty well.”

Painting isn’t one of this jack-of-all trades’ favorite trades, but it was one of the many things that needed to be done at Glenmary’s mission in Chapmanville, W.Va., where he spent two months after taking his First Oath as a Glenmary Home Missioner and taking the title “brother.” The previous year, as a second-year novice, Brother Craig worked out of Glenmary’s mission in Waldron, Ark.

Before resuming his formal studies this fall at Brescia University in Owensboro, Ky., Brother Craig wanted to experience Appalachian culture and took advantage of the opportunity to go to West Virginia and work with Brother Mike Springer.

Brother Craig has learned that the people in this part of Appalachia are a “little bit wary of strangers.” He explains this wariness in terms of their past experience with the coal companies. Strangers—usually connected to the coal companies—often arrive in the area to buy the mineral rights to land owned by local people. The coal companies then strip mine the coal, often harming the environment and water supply and destroying the property.

He has also learned that there are a lot of unchurched people in the three mission counties Glenmary serves in southern West Virginia. Attendance at not only the Catholic, but also the Protestant, churches has fallen away in recent years, making Brother Craig’s ministry effort a little tougher.

This decline in membership is a big contrast from Brother Craig’s experience at St. Jude Thaddeus in Waldron. “The mission there has grown tremendously in the last few years,” he says. His year there was an “overall great experience,” with a lot of good things happening ecumenically and in his outreach work with the youth, prisoners in the jail, and the elderly.

Although Glenmary brothers have earned a reputation for building—and Brother Craig has carpentry, welding and electrical skills—he says he wants his ministry to focus on spending time with people. Both in Waldron and in Chapmanville, Brother Craig has done outreach with the elderly from just visiting to helping out at cookouts or calling bingo. Sometimes during his visits with the elderly in their homes his handy-man skills are put to use as he does small home maintenance projects for them.

In addition to working with the elderly, Brother Craig is also involved in prison ministry and regularly visited the inmates at the Danville, Ark., jail while he was at the Waldron mission. He says he would find the guys just waiting for him when he walked into the jail.

“They wanted to hear scripture,” he says, “and they actually wanted to hear preaching.” Although Brother Craig really isn’t a preacher, he says he shared his faith with the prisoners in both evangelical and ecumenical ways as the prisoners weren’t familiar with the Catholic faith.

In this ministry, Brother Craig just tries to be there “for some of the guys who don’t have anybody visiting them and who feel alone. I try to offer them hope.”

“I’m big on faith in action,” Brother Craig says. He often uses Matthew 22: 37-39 where Jesus proclaims the greatest commandments to start a discussion of not only faith in God, but also love of neighbor. He tries to connect the prisoners’ faith with them taking responsibility for their actions. That responsibility, he tells them, applies both while they are incarcerated and when they are released and begin reforming their lives.

Brother Craig hopes to continue with prison ministry while working on an associate’s degree in ministry at Brescia University in Owensboro, this fall.

Although his family remains in the farm country of Iowa, Brother Craig expects to see his sons a couple of times a year. He rests assured that he has raised them to be independent and capable men. His son Tony is teaching theology at the high school that Brother Craig attended and son Kyle is entering seminary this fall for the Archdiocese of Dubuque. “I’m just tickled with what they’re doing with their lives,” Brother Craig says.

Although Brother Craig’s vocational journey is not typical (coming to Glenmary after having raised a family) he doesn’t think of it in those terms. “I just think of it as answering a call,” he says. “I have a great love for the Church, our faith and to be a part of passing that on where there are so few Catholics is something I really like.”

This article originally appeared in the August 2008 Boost-A-Month Club Newsletter