Blog # 313 Back In Business

Blog # 313  Back In Business

                It has been since September of last year (2013) that I published the most recent blog.
It might be a good idea before beginning what I hope will be a more regular experience of publishing new blogs, to introduce myself as the author of Catholic Insights.  My name is Fr. Charlie Hughes, born in Woodhaven, Queens County, New York City, on a Saturday afternoon upstairs in the back bedroom on a Saturday afternoon in December 1927.  I was there but I don't remember it, so, like yourself  I take the information I gave you as true on the word of others, by faith. 
                  In 1947, in my third year of college, I joined a Religious  Community that had its origin just a few years before in 1939.   Our  name is: THE HOME MISSIONERS OF AMERICA. Our Founder was Father William Howard Bishop, a Diocesan priest from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland.
                  Father Bishop had become aware of some startling statistics about the presence of the Catholic Church here in the United States.  Growing  up in Woodhaven, you could walk to any one of several Catholic Churches in almost any direction.  Ordained a priest in 1954, my first assignment was in Statesboro, Georgia in the  Diocese of Savannah. We had three Home Mission priests and one Home Mission Brother assigned to the parish which covered seven Counties, a hundred miles from north to south and  seventy two miles from east to west. Similar situations to ours were the norm in rural areas throughout the South and Southwest.
                   Father Bishop made a map of the United States showing the Counties where there were no Catholic Churches.  He colored in those Counties and it was obvious there was a very large region of them in the South and Southwest.  He labeled the Counties that did not have a Catholic Church as a whole: NO-PRIEST LAND, U S A .  The Catholic Church was a Metropolitan-based Church. In founding his Religious Community he invited his fellow-Catholics to join him in prayer and an effort to recruit members for  the new Community who would dedicate themselves to the work of making the  Catholic church available in  the home mission field right here in the United States in a similar way the  Maryknoll Missioners and others had so successfully done with regard to foreign mission territories.
                   If you want to know more about us here is  list of  available contact points:
P O box 464518, Cincinnati, OH 45246-4518;  (513) 874-8900;   www/Glenmary.org ;  info@glenmary,org.
                     On the occasion of my 60th anniversary of ordination as a  Glenmary priest I am almost totally deaf and hardly capable of  continuing to carry on the role of a Pastor of a local parish. I have moved back to our headquarters in Cincinnati in hope that through prayer and the writing of blogs I will be able to continue live out  my passion for evangelization and respond positively in this limited but real way to the command of  Jesus to proclaim to all the world the message we have received
from Him.