The following story first appeared in the Autumn 1999 issue of Glenmary Challenge.  
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Father Bob Dalton
A Glenmary Vocation Story
By Karen Hurley

Father Bob Dalton greets parishioners in Russellville, Ala. “This is a wonderful place to be,” he says of this ethnically diverse rural community.

For Bob Dalton, the faraway places and strange cultures he read about in mission magazines always had an appeal. As a sixth- grader in upstate New York in the 1940s, he remembers fantasizing about being a missionary in the jungles of New Guinea.

But it wasn’t until the principal of his high school specifically invited him to consider priesthood, just months before graduation, that he began to turn some of those daydreams into reality.  

As a seminarian for the Diocese of Rochester in the early 1950s, he found himself saying, “Yes, I want to be a priest—but this is not the place. So I thought about Maryknoll” (the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America).  

“I had never heard of Glenmary and didn’t realize there was such a thing as home missionaries,” he recalls. But soon after being introduced to Glenmary’s vocation director, he found himself “bitten” by the idea of the home missions. His final decision for Glenmary was made while hitchhiking through Georgia. When he couldn’t get a ride any further, he decided to stop at the Catholic mission in Statesboro around 4 p.m. on a hot July day. There he met Father Joe Nagele, the Glenmary pastor serving a seven-county area, and the two Glenmary seminarians working with him for the summer.

“I was so impressed with them as individuals,” he says. “I knew Glenmary was for me.” He entered Glenmary in 1957 at age 22. 

Now, looking back, Father Bob realizes other things also entered into his decision for Glenmary. “Responding to poverty was always part of my call,” he says.

He tells of his experience working highway construction one summer before entering Glenmary. His job placed him in front of a migrant-worker camp where he saw preachers with loud-speakers. 

“I can do better than that!” he remembers thinking. He also remembers the desire to respond to the physical as well as the spiritual needs of these people trapped in poverty. 

Father Bob finally had his chance with microphone and loud-speaker. In the summer of 1963, he worked out of a trailer chapel in North Carolina. “I didn’t pack them in,” he admits. “It did more for me than the people I preached to.”

How so?

“This was where I cut my teeth on missionary work. If you can face a crowd as a street preacher, you can do anything!”

For the next six years, he threw himself 150 percent into Glenmary’s mission of serving the spiritual and material needs of rural communities in North Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The result: a case of ministry burn out which also coincided with all the changes in religious life unleashed by Vatican II.

“In 1969 I thought about leaving Glenmary and the priesthood,” he says. “But I didn’t.” 

What he did do was get serious about his prayer life. “And I got a spiritual director,” he emphasizes. “I was looked on by others at the time as successful, but I knew I was empty inside.”

Deciding to seriously nurture his spiritual life is part of what has kept Bob Dalton in Glenmary for 41 years. But there is more to his staying. As he puts it: “I’ve always enjoyed what I have been doing.” 

After advanced studies in theology (1969-70), he got involved in formation and novitiate work. He spent five years (1977-82)  as director of Glenmary’s House of Studies in Washington, D.C.

Beginning in 1982 he was assigned to full-time ecumenical work, focusing on Baptist-Catholic relations. He continued this work part-time after being elected Glenmary’s first vice president in 1987. 

Father Bob’s current assignment as pastor of Good Shepherd Church in Russellville, Alabama, follows on the heels of his four-year term as president of Glenmary (1991-95). And he is still enjoying what he is doing.

“This is a wonderful place to be,” he begins, when asked to describe the rural community where he ministers. Each Sunday about 100 English- speakers come for Mass, some of whom are Filipino. And 375 come for two Spanish-language Masses. 

“Never in my wildest dreams when I entered Glenmary could I have thought I would be pastoring a church where the majority of people are Spanish speaking,” he muses. And never would he have imagined himself preaching in Spanish!

He took time out in 1996 to study Spanish in San Antonio, and he now says he can converse in a rudimentary way. But when it comes to preaching, he always writes his homily down and reads it—not trusting any ad libs.

His worst nightmare: when, during his Spanish homily, people start to laugh and he hasn’t intended to say anything funny. “I just hope I haven’t said anything obscene,” he quips. In one such moment of unplanned humor he announced to a small group of parishioners that he was pregnant!

Does he worry about the future of Glenmary, about whether others will be “bitten,” as he was, by the challenge of the home missions?

“Yes, I do,” he confesses. But he is quick to describe the kind of men Glenmary needs: “pioneering spirits—not content with business as usual. We need men who want to collaborate with lay workers,” he emphasizes. “This is the future!”  

In Alabama he works closely with a Glenmary lay pastoral coordinator in the next county. “Bob Laremore really is the missionary and the pastor for Lawrence County,” Father Bob says, “and I have to learn how to assist him.”

He knows there are—and will continue to be—many differences between the men who entered Glenmary in his generation and those entering religious life today. For one thing, he says, “they are coming at a later age—with more experiences of life and work.” 

“To serve is only part of the issue for them,” he observes. “They are hungering for something. I wonder if Glenmary has what they are hungering for?”

Glenmary does have a distinctive spirituality to offer—one based in service and respect for God’s presence among all people. But we aren’t always good about articulating it, he concludes.

The Russellville mission was turned back to the Diocese of Birmingham in June 2000.

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