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In
Search of the Spirit
A
monthly letter from the Glenmary Vocation Office
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June 2007
Praying for the Spirit's Guidance
The last two week of June, the entire Glenmary Home Missioners’ community will go in search of the Spirit asking for guidance in planning for the next four years. The planning and election our leadership will happen during our community’s first-ever Chapter of the Whole. Chapter meetings are an extremely important time in the life of our religious society and these 
gatherings happen only every four years. During this time, after a period of three days of prayer, we will elect or re-elect officers for the next four years and then move into clarifying our vision and setting our direction for the next four years of missionary service to the rural areas of the United States of America. To do this, we need the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and we need to re-connect ourselves with our founder, Father William Howard Bishop, and the founding charism.
One of the admirable qualities of Father Bishop was his ability to adjust his vision of what God wanted. For instance, for almost two years, (from spring 1934 to late winter of 1935) he felt the inner call to strengthen the moral and material lives of rural people. He had a grand plan: “The Clarksville Rehabilitation Colony Project.” He spent a great deal of time and effort to make this plan a reality in Clarksville, Md. He wrote letters to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the state of Maryland, and many others. Ultimately, his plan failed when local farmers, many who were his parishioners, refused to give their approval for the plan to go forward. Giving up on this idea, a new idea emerges, even more bold than the first.
In the spring of 1936, Father Bishop begins to promote the idea of an American society of home mission priests, brothers and sisters. He dreams of bringing the Church to rural areas of the United States so those in rural America would have the opportunity for Catholic worship and sacramental life. In 1939 this dream becomes a reality when he founds Glenmary Home Missioners.
In the early 1950s Father Bishop begins to see that conversion to the Catholic Church is slow and that there is much anti-Catholic prejudice in the rural South. Thus, he begins to write more and more about the missionary task as being one of “moral uplift” of the people. He begins to articulate that the Glenmary missioner is to strive for the moral uplift of all God’s people in the county where he serves. He calls this idea the spread of “catholicity” where Catholic morality and the love of Jesus helps improve peoples’ lives both spiritually and materially.
Over time, he continues to modify his vision and continues to respond to the will of God. This month, the Glenmary community of the 21st century aims to do the same. We hope to study and respond to the reality of rural America today, the reality of who God has called to serve those in both spiritual and material need in these areas. We hope to set a direction for the next four years, a direction that serves God, serves God’s people and brings life to Glenmary and our community of missioners. As you search for God’s spirit in your individual life, please pray that the Spirit will guide our communal life as well.
