Glenmary Charts Home Mission Challenge for U.S. Church
New Glenmary Maps to Highlight Shifting Populations in Rural America

Father Bishop's "Missionary Map of the United States," showing "priestless counties," appeared on page one of the first issue of The Challenge in 1938.

CINCINNATI (May 17, 1999)—As the U.S. Census Bureau gears up for the 2000 Census, the Research Center of the Glenmary Home Missioners is preparing to use that data, as well as data from a new church membership study, to chart anew the home mission challenge for the U.S. Catholic Church. The questions and concerns that will shape these new maps—and Glenmary's future ministry—are detailed in "Mapping Mission," by Karen Hurley, in the summer issue of Glenmary Challenge.

"One thing is obvious," says Glenmary President Jerry Dorn. "The whole effect of the migration of Latinos into rural America is having a tremendous impact on our ministry." New maps from the Glenmary Research Center will track the influx of this new type of Catholic population into rural America.

But this is only one concrete instance of the complexity of population changes in home mission areas, says sociologist Ken Sanchagrin, Ph.D., the director of the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn. There is also significant in-migration of Asians—some Catholic and some not—as well as "Yankee Catholics."

In addition to U.S. Census data, another key component for building new Glenmary maps is the membership data for all U.S. religious denominations. This information has been collected every 10 years since 1970 by the Association of Statisticians for American Religious Bodies and published by the Glenmary Research Center under the title Churches and Church Membership in the United States. The  2000 study, however, will be titled Religious Congregations Membership Study due to the increased participation from Jewish congregations.

"This is the only source of this kind of data," Research Director Sanchagrin points out. "When people call the U.S. Census Bureau to find out how many Protestants there are in Minnesota, the Census Bureau tells them: 'Call the Glenmary Research Center.'"

The data for this new religious denomination membership study will be collected as close as possible to April 1, 2000, to align with U.S. Census data. Each  denomination is responsible for collecting its own data, but Glenmary Home Missioners takes responsibility for collecting Catholic membership data—and paying the costs involved. "Glenmary sees this as part of its commitment to provide home mission leadership to the larger Church and to keep the missionary challenge before all Catholics," says Hurley, who is communications director for Glenmary.

The new maps now being planned by the Research Center are part of a long tradition of Glenmary map-making which began over 60 years ago with Glenmary's founder, Father William Howard Bishop. He created the first "No Priest Land U.S.A." map in 1937 to dramatize the need for a special home mission effort . On a map of the 3,000 U.S. counties, he colored in the over 1,000 with no resident priest. Most of these were in Appalachia, the rural South and Southwest—areas that Glenmary priests, brothers and lay coworkers have served since Glenmary's founding in 1939.

"People know Glenmary by our speckled maps," says Glenmary president Father Jerry Dorn. Over the years the speckles have changed amidst increasingly sophisticated analyses and a changing pastoral context. A 1988 Glenmary map, for instance, tracks the number of counties with "at least one congregation with a full-time pastoral agent other than a priest."

Over the years Glenmary maps have been an invaluable tool in mission education. "Many Catholics (both laity and clergy) in the heavily Catholic areas of the country find these graphic depictions of the absence of Catholic presence hard to believe," says Father Dorn. "But they have also made believers of many who, because of these maps, have a heightened sense of their own responsibility to support the home mission effort and to become missionary themselves."

The new series of Glenmary maps will detail Catholic Church absence—along with other critical factors such as percent of population living below the poverty level and percent of population unchurched—to help Glenmary and the entire U.S. Church understand the home mission challenge for the coming millennium.

For more information about Glenmary and the areas in which it serves, contact communications@glenmary.org.