The following story first appeared in the Summer 1999 Glenmary Challenge.
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Mapping Mission
 From 'No Priest Land, USA' to Mission Land, USA,' Glenmary continues to chart the home mission challenge for the US Church
By Karen Hurley

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.

Maps have always been an important part of Glenmary’s story.

It was a map that founder Father William Howard Bishop carried with him in the early 1930s as he traveled from one U.S. bishop to another trying to convince someone to sponsor his dream for a new home mission society. Successive versions of this “No Priest Land, U.S.A.” map have been used by Glenmarians ever since to explain to U.S. Catholics that mission fields exist at home as well as afar.

Father Bishop, who had worked for a map-making company while a student at Harvard in 1909, created the first “No Priest Land, U.S.A.” map by hand. On a map detailing the United States’ 3,000 counties, he colored in the over 1,000 that had no resident priest. This was the map that reinforced his own conviction that a special missionary effort was needed in Appalachia and the rural South. This was the map he laid before Cincinnati’s Archbishop John McNicholas when he first met with him on a Saturday in 1937 hopeful that, at last, he might find a home for his dream.

In a diary entry later that day, Father Bishop wrote: “Saturday, April 17, 1937. The Archbishop of Cincinnati agrees to headquarter my society.” The map worked its power. Glenmary’s mission to rural America was launched.

Now, over 60 years later, maps still play a key role in charting Glenmary’s future—and the missionary challenge for the U.S. Church.

And Glenmary is still making the maps!

Changing Speckles

“People know Glenmary by our speckled maps,” says Father Jerry Dorn, current president of Glenmary. The story of these speckled maps—and how they have changed over the years—is one way to capture a slice of Glenmary’s history.

The map that a Glenmarian today might hold up in one of the more than 100 annual mission appeals in parishes across the county is a far different map from the one Father Bishop created. More recent maps produced by the Glenmary Research Center reveal increasingly sophisticated analyses and a changing pastoral context. A 1988 map, for instance, tracks the number of counties with “at least one congregation with a full-time pastoral agent other than a priest.”

The various editions of the early “No Priest Land, U.S.A.” map became the image associated with Glenmary for decades. Hundreds of thousands of prayer cards featuring some version of this map on one side and Father Bishop’s “Prayer for the Home Missions” on the other were printed and distributed over these years. Gradually, in the years after Vatican II, the title “No Priest Land U.S.A” gave way to “Mission Land, U.S.A.”

The founding of the Glenmary Research Center in 1966 spawned a variety of new Glenmary maps. This map-making effort finds new energy at the beginning of each decade as new census data become available and a new edition of the Churches and Church Membership Study is published by the Glenmary Research Center.

A sampling of the titles of the maps spawned by the data from each new census and each new Church membership study reveals how far Glenmary maps have come from that first “No Priest Land” map of Father Bishop: Percent of Population Unchurched by Counties of the US: 1971; Ranking Christian Denominations by Counties of the U.S.: 1971; The Catholic Home Mission Fields of the United States (1976); Catholic Percent of Total Population (1982); Catholic Pastoral Ministry in the Southern United States: 1988; Percent of Change in Catholic Population: 1971-1990.       

New Glenmary Maps for the New Millennium

Today, on the brink of the U.S. census for year 2000, Glenmary is gearing up to draw new maps for the new millennium. Key to that effort is Ken Sanchagrin, Ph.D., the new director of Glenmary’s Research Center. A sociologist by training, Ken also has roots in Glenmary.

“The maps and a certain romanticism about rural life”—that is what Ken says attracted him to Glenmary in 1962. He left before being ordained in 1965 to pursue an academic career. But that rural commitment continues to shape his life. He lives with his wife and family in western North Carolina where he chairs the sociology department at Mars Hill College.

And the maps have always been with him. “Every Introduction to Sociology textbook contains a Glenmary map,” he points out.

Now he is overseeing the Glenmary Research Center in its effort to make sure a new generation of Glenmary maps are available to Glenmary and the wider public.

But before the new maps, there must come a new Church member-ship study to provide the necessary data on which the maps are built. This study—conducted in 1970, 1980 and 1990 under the auspices of the Association of Statisticians for American Religious Bodies (ASARB)—collects membership data for U.S. religious denominations. A grant from the Lilly Endowment helps to support this effort.

The Glenmary Research Center publishes this data for ASARB in a book which has been titled in previous years Churches and Church Membership in the United States. This year, however, with increased participation by Jewish congregations, the title will be Religious Congregations Membership Study. Some initial outreach has been made to Islamic leadership, Ken says, but the extent of their participation is not yet clear.

“This is the only source of this kind of data,” he 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 actual data collection for the membership study will be done as close to April 1, 2000, as possible, to align with U.S. Census data. Each denomination handles and pays for the collection of its own membership data, except  the U.S. bishops.

Glenmary has always taken responsibility for collecting Catholic membership data—and picking up 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.

The Power of Maps

These 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 Jerry Dorn. But they have also made believers of many who, because of the maps, have a heightened sense of their own responsibility to support the home mission effort and, in Father Jerry’s words, “to become missionary” themselves. Certainly the many donors who contribute regularly to support Glenmary ministry are among these.

Maps reveal the questions and concerns of their makers. A look back over the maps in the Glenmary Archives reveals a history of shifting questions and concerns—from counting priestless counties, to counting counties with priests—but not in rural areas, to counting percentages of  ‘unchurched,’ to tracking the percentage of families living in poverty. In 1988, just as Glenmary was embarking on its initiative to start new mission churches with lay leaders, the first map appeared noting counties with a pastoral agent other than a priest.

What questions and concerns will guide the new maps after the 2000 U.S. Census?

 “One thing is obvious,” says President Father Jerry Dorn. “The whole effect of the migration of Latinos into rural America is having a tremendous impact on our ministry—and our plans for ministry in the future.”

So new maps from the Research Center will certainly track the influx of this new type of Catholic population. But this is only one concrete instance of the complexity of population changes in mission areas, says Ken Sanchagrin. There is also significant in-migration of Asians—some Catholic and some not—as well as “Yankee Catholics.”

The role of the Research Center, Ken reiterates, is to provide Glenmary with sound data upon which to make sound decisions about how and where to do future ministry. 

Ken recalls a recent conversation with a Glenmarian about how Glenmary responds to new challenges for ministry.  His comment: “Turn the information into a map and Glenmarians will believe it and take it seriously!”

True sons of their map-maker founder!