No-Priest-Land

Despite the Catholic drive for big families and no birth control, U.S. Catholics are not fully reproducing themselves except in the country parishes--and more than 80% of U.S. Catholics live in cities.

Many a churchman sees a Catholic decline ahead unless the Catholic Church can strengthen itself in the rural areas, where families are still big enough to keep church membership growing. With Protestants outnumbering Catholics in rural areas by nearly five to one (the national ratio is less than two to one), falling urban birthrates (ten adults now rear only seven children) threaten to make Catholicism relatively less important in the next generation. The cities depend for survival on immigration from the countryside or overseas. In 1941 urban Catholic churches are not drawing much new strength from either source.

The Catholic organization most directly concerned with this problem met last week to do something about it. This was the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, which gathered in Jefferson City, Mo. for its 19th annual convention. It discussed dozens of ways to strengthen rural Catholicism.

The Conference's founder, Father Edwin Vincent O'Hara, now Bishop of Kansas City, says that Catholicism urgently needs 10,000 strong country parishes. Instead, 1,022 of the U.S.'s 2,952 counties have no resident Catholic priest at all and another 500 have no Catholic priest in their rural sections.

This Catholic dilemma traces back to the shortage of priests when America's first great flood of Catholic immigrants--the Irish--arrived in the wake of the 1845 potato famine. Rather than have these largely rural Irish scatter to country districts and lose their faith through lack of contact, the American hierarchy under the leadership of New York's Archbishop John Hughes decided it would be better to concentrate them in the cities, where the relatively few priests available could cope with the crowds.

More priests were quickly trained, but never quite enough to keep up to the pace as other waves of Catholic immigrants rolled in: Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, Hungarians. So tens of thousands who might otherwise have gone to the land were encouraged to stay in the cities. The hierarchy's policy had sound reason back of it; many Catholics who settled on isolated farms where no priest was handy did backslide. Example: Shannon County, Mo., which (as its name indicates) was settled by Irish, but now has neither a Catholic church nor a priest.

Many a thoughtful Catholic is worried by present-day results of this old policy. From 1920 to 1938, the birthrate of half-Catholic, largely urban Massachusetts fell from 23.7 to 13.8. The rate in one-third-Catholic New York City fell from 23.4 to 14.4. Parochial-school enrollment of elementary pupils has slumped on almost exactly the same curve as public-school attendance since 1930--despite increased church pressure to have Catholics send their children to church schools.

Last year the Catholic liberal weekly Commonweal reported: "The urban Irish have long since stopped even reproducing themselves; the urban Italians and Slavs are rapidly following their example. From the figures given in the [Official Catholic] Directory of 1940, it is evident that only the Mexicans are more than reproducing themselves in the various Catholic national groups." (The French-Canadians in New England are also doing so.)

America, the Jesuit weekly, has put the problem with equal bluntness: "Without rural life, in a couple of generations we shall begin closing a fair-sized proportion of our city churches in the U.S."

Like a Heathen Land. Last week's convention showed that Catholics do not mean to sit still while this happens. Fourteen bishops attended, the most ever. Many another prelate sent a personal representative, and for the first time a bishop, the Most Rev. Aloisius Joseph Muench of Fargo, was elected president. This was significant, because no Catholic movement can prosper unless it is backed by the hierarchy.

The Conference wants to keep present Catholics on the farms, encourage city Catholics to move to the country, make converts in the rural areas. To these ends it applauded plans:

1) To open vacation parochial schools where there are too few Catholic children to justify schools open the year round.

2) To bring farm children to city parochial schools by bus even from distances up to 25 and 30 miles.

3) To evangelize "No-Priest-Land"--i.e., rural America--in the same way "as a foreign missionary approaches the heathen," largely through a new order of priests called the Home Missioners of America.

4) To teach isolated Catholics and potential converts the elements of the faith by mail.

5) To add trailer medical centers to the trailer chapels now used in non-Catholic regions. The St. Louis Archdiocese has just built a twelve-ton truck trailer medical unit to tour doctorless-dentistless districts and serve both Catholics and non-Catholics.

6) To support sisterhoods trained to visit scattered Catholic families in rural districts and keep them in closer touch with the Church.

7) To encourage each largely urban diocese to "adopt" a rural diocese and big city parishes to "adopt" country parishes, defraying the cost of missionary work there.

8) To train rural pastors to meet present-day social and economic problems on the farms just as the Schools of Social Justice (TIME, Aug. 25) are already training priests to meet the-social and economic problems in industrial areas.

This eighth plan reflects most clearly the basic program contemplated by the Conference, which agreed that the best way to get more Catholics to live on farms and raise more children is to make farm life more attractive and to identify Catholicism with various movements designed to raise the standard of rural living. The Conference particularly opposed the present trend towards big mechanized farms and proposed taxing them out of existence by graduating land taxes to penalize size. It wanted people with a farm background put on family-size farms. It also wanted factory workers encouraged to live on small rural homesteads where they could grow enough food to supplement their income and give their children the benefit of a country upbringing.

Catholics have always been strong for the preservation of the family unit. The Conference endorsed the warning of Dr. Oliver Edwin Baker of the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

"On the farm the family is an economic as well as a social unit, but in our industrial and commercial system the individual tends to become the economic unit and the state tends to replace the family and the church in the education of the child, the provision of economic security, and now, in much of Europe, in inculcating religion."

Catholic Lebensraum. Pope Pius XII in effect approved these proposals in his Pentecostal pronouncement last June when he spoke of "the vital space of the family" which he identified as "a homestead of one's own . . . land, the holding in which the family lives, and from the products of which it draws all or part of its subsistence."

Spark plug of the Conference was tireless, genial Monsignor Luigi G. Ligutti, who since January has been its first full-time executive secretary. He has a good background for successfully preaching the gospel of rural life. Until January he was pastor of the Catholic church at Granger, Iowa, whose 300 citizens he found living in tumble-down shacks with no bathrooms. They worked winters in soft-coal mines. During the long summer layoffs, they struggled along on relief.

In 1935 Monsignor Ligutti wangled a $200,000 Government project for his town, installed 50 families in stanch cottages on four-acre plots. No one there has been on relief since--a saving of some $23,000 in relief costs since Granger became self-sufficient. Working on their land during mining layoffs, Granger's citizens have run a lone original cow up to a herd of 65, multiplied two pigs into some 350, grown food for themselves and to sell. They buy cooperatively, run their own bank and store, have already paid back $50,000 of their $200,000 Government loan--making Granger the most nearly self-liquidating of the New Deal's back-to-the-land experiments.

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