Father Jerry Dorn and Sister Kathleen Mulchrone prepare for Mass in the Prayer Room in Frenchburg, Ky.

In a rural town east of Lexington, Ky., a small white building stands in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Behind the building a hill, not quite a mountain, rises covered with trees. On a Tuesday evening perhaps only six, sometimes as many as 15, people gather in the small white building to pray, to sing and to share the Eucharist. Glenmary Father Jerry Dorn is celebrating Mass in Frenchburg.

Father Jerry is pastor of three eastern Kentucky counties—Bath, Morgan and Menifee, in which Frenchburg is located. Although Bath and Morgan counties have well-established Glenmary mission churches, Menifee County had no official Catholic presence until Glenmary Sister Kathleen Mulchrone moved to Frenchburg in 1997. When Father Jerry became pastor of these three counties five years ago, he first started celebrating Mass in the house that Sister Kathleen rents.

About three years ago volunteer groups that Sister Kathleen has been associated with for years from Chicago, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and western Kentucky constructed a small building beside her house that they call the Prayer Room.

The Prayer Room has been enlarged and the Blessed Sacrament is now reserved there with approval from Bishop Ronald Gainer of the Diocese of Lexington. Glenmary novice Aaron Wessman, who works with Father Jerry in Morgan County, teaches Confirmation classes in the Frenchburg Prayer Room and every Tuesday night Father Jerry celebrates Mass with the parishioners there.

Sister Kathleen’s groups of volunteers help with other building projects in Menifee County as well. “There are all kinds of poor homes in the area,” Sister Kathleen says. Right now the volunteers are building an extension onto the home of a 5-year-old boy who is battling cancer “so that little Danny can have a decent room to live in,” she says.

In addition to the building projects, Sister Kathleen and a couple of parishioners run the Mountain Christian Thrift Shop which provides clothing, small household goods and sometimes food to those in need.

Father Jerry’s other two missions, Prince of Peace in West Liberty (Morgan County) and St. Julie in Owingsville (Bath County), also have food pantries to help the poor. Other outreach efforts include remodeling homes by working with Gateway, a local government agency. “We have the best contact with some of the desperately poor of the area,” Father Jerry says. In order to help them, “we plug in with an agency that’s right here in the community.”

Sometimes the volunteers clean houses or paint; other times they build ramps for the elderly, or do roofing. Groups from St. Maximilian Kolbe Church in Cincinnati come to help with projects, as do volunteers from the Glenmary Farm. “We’re utilizing the volunteerism of young people around the country,” Father Jerry says.

Serving in eastern Kentucky has its challenges. As is true for many Glenmarians, Father Jerry’s missions encompass a large geographic area. From his residence in West Liberty he frequently travels to the missions in Bath and Menifee counties and to two state prisons where he volunteers as chaplain. It takes close to an hour to travel one-way to each of these places he says.

When a parishioner in Frenchburg was in the hospital he traveled the 32 miles to Morehead to see her. When she was moved to a nursing home he drove the hour to Owingsville to pray with her and anoint her. And when she died, he traveled to Owingsville for the funeral.

Another challenge is the religious makeup of the eastern Kentucky area that Father Jerry characterizes as having a strong Protestant culture and very few Catholics. If you are a Catholic you are a minority “everywhere you go, whatever you do,” he says. Catholics learn very quickly “what it means to be someone who is not very significant.” All the Catholic people want to be “looked upon as accepted and as good people,” he says. The biggest challenge is to help his parishioners “be comfortable being Catholic in a very Protestant culture.”

Sister Kathleen agrees that there is some prejudice against Catholics but says, “I just try to be kind to those people and let them know who we really are as Catholics.” One way she and Sister Kathy Burke, who joined her last October, do that is to meet as many people as they can in the area. “With everything we do we try to be a witness,” Sister Kathleen says.

Sister Kathleen’s efforts in Frenchburg have grown into a small mission community. It is a beginning. “We begin in very small ways,” Father Wil Steinbacher, Glenmary senior member and point person for home mission leadership says, “It’s the constant—we gather people in storefronts, theatres, old buildings, old churches. It’s the missionary effort to begin to plant the seeds of the Church that will grow.”

In eastern Kentucky another seed has been planted. In a small white building in the foothills of Appalachia, Mass is being celebrated in Frenchburg.

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