The following article first appeared in the September 2000 Boost-A-Month Club Newsletter.  For more information about becoming a Boost-A-Month member, call 1-800-935-0975 or contact Father Dominic Duggins.

Lay Leaders Welcomed to Glenmary 'Family'
Leading Missions in Virginia and Mississippi

Father Mike Langell blesses new lay pastoral coordinators Sister Kate Regan (left) and Christine Ramirez during a sending ritual celebrated at Glenmary’s Department of Pastoral Services in Nashville.

The ministerial journeys of Christine Ramirez and Sister Kate Regan have been very different, but have led them to the same place—Glenmary. Both were welcomed into the Glenmary family last month as the lay leaders for missions in Clintwood, Va., and Ripley, Miss., respectively. 

In Glenmary missions led by pastoral coordinators, lay leaders are hired as the official church administrators of the parish and perform pastoral and administrative duties while an ordained priest serves as sacramental minister.

Christine is the mother of three as well as a grandmother and great-grandmother. When she first thought about her future in Church ministry, she saw herself serving as a lay pastoral coordinator for a parish in a “little town in California. I never dreamed this journey would lead me to the hills of Virginia.”

It was at age 50 her journey to Clintwood, Va., officially began. After 40 years living in California and being involved on the fringes of Church ministry, she returned to college and, in four year’s time, earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and master’s degree in pastoral theology. She lived on campus with women 30 years her junior, an experience she now sees as one of many life experiences which have prepared her for “this time and this place.”

Other life experiences include serving as a pastoral associate in an Iowa parish and most recently working as coordinator of family life in the Diocese of Lafayette, Ind. 

While in Indiana, she began looking for a “little more hands-on type of ministry,” she says, when she came across an advertisement for Glenmary’s lay pastoral coordinator program. “Glenmary has been wonderful,” she says as she finished the first stage in Glenmary’s new Missionary Formation Program for lay coworkers in Nashville. 

“This two-week program has been very practical,” she says. “We have gained some very useful information that we’ll need to know in the missions.” For example, sessions were offered on an introduction to small-town living, business administration and preaching.

These are things most lay ministry programs don’t offer because ministry in suburban, developed parishes differs drastically from ministry in the small, rural, predominately non-Catholic counties Glenmary serves.

Those areas aren’t unfamiliar to Sister of St. Joseph Kate Regan, who also attended the program. She has spent the better part of her 40 years as a professed religious working in just those settings. Settling in to the Catholic Community of Tippah County in Ripley, Miss., is a lot like “coming home,” Sister Kate says. 

She spent six years ministering in central Mississippi and two years working in Glenmary missions in Pontotoc and New Albany, Miss. In addition, she has ministered in North Georgia and Louisiana.

“There was just something inside me calling me back to Mississippi,” she says. That call, combined with hearing about the opening for a lay pastoral coordinator in Ripley was all the incentive she needed to apply for the position as the Tippah County mission’s second lay pastoral coordinator. It was established in 1997 by lay leader Polly Duncan Collum.

One of the challenges she will face in her new position is ministering to the Spanish-speaking parishioners in Ripley, who outnumber the English-speakers.

That, too, is not unfamiliar to Sister Kate. Prior to coming to Glenmary, she spent five years as the pastoral associate at a Hispanic parish in Colorado. Seeing the need to communicate in Spanish, she has just completed an intense year of study in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

“It’s very comforting to know Sigifredo and Dora Bonillo (multicultural workers assisting in Hispanic ministry at the Tippah County mission) will be there,” she says. “I’m looking forward to collaborating with them as we serve the Hispanics of the area as well as all members of the Catholic community.”

“Glenmary has been a part of my life for a very long time and I’m very excited to be ‘officially’ part of the family now,” she says.

Both Christine and Sister Kate expressed excitement about getting to the work at hand. Both were sent forth from Glenmary’s Robert C. Berson Center in Nashville to begin that work in their missions with a sending ritual for missionaries. 

Upon arriving in Clintwood and Ripley, each will face similar tasks: moving into a new home, meeting members of the Catholic community, and taking time to soak up all the local culture and traditions.