EXTENSION Continued...

    This situation drew the attention of Father Francis Clement Kelley, a young priest from Prince Edward Island, Canada, who was stationed in Lapeer, Michigan, in the Archdiocese of Detroit. When he first arrived in Lapeer in 1893, Father Kelley was dismayed to find Catholics worshipping in a clapboard church on the outskirts of town. The 23-year-old priest, the youngest ordained priest in the U.S. at the time, led a campaign to build a new Gothic stone structure. Looking for a way to pay off the construction debts, Father Kelley enlisted as a military chaplain during the Spanish-American War. After his service ended, his horse Teddy (named after Theodore Roosevelt) was raffled off for $ 1,500 to reduce the debt on the still-unfinished church. Father Kelley later joined a lecture circuit, telling audiences about his war experiences. The money he earned was used to pay off the church building debt.

    During his travels across the country, Father Kelley realized that there were Catholic communities in small rural areas in far worse condition than his own - communities that lacked churches and even clergy. He found such appalling conditions in the town of Ellsworth, Kan., that he was motivated to write “Shanty Story” for a popular priests’ magazine. The story, which began with the words, “I know a little shanty in the West, patched and desolate ...” described the destitute conditions of churches in rural America.

    Father Kelley began to urge the Catholic Church to do what Protestants were already doing: asking affluent churches to help much poorer congregations. His vision to create an “extension” society to raise money to aid the Catholic Church in poor, rural communities earned the support of Chicago’s Archbishop James Quigley. On October 18,1905, at a meeting in the Archbishop’s residence in Chicago, the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United States of America was established.

Catholic Extension takes the church on the road

    In the December 1906 issue of the organization’s monthly publication, EXTENSION Magazine, Father Kelley wrote an article about a novelty he had recently toured at the St. Louis World’s Fair - a railroad car that had been converted into a Baptist chapel-on-wheels. The article caught the imagination of Detroit ad salesman Ambrose Retry, who donated America’s first Catholic railroad “chapel car,” the St. Anthony. The Pullman-style railroad car, retrofitted with pews, an altar, confessional and an office and sleeping room for a chaplain, soon traversed the country, towed by railroad companies free of charge.

    Two more chapel cars - the St. Peter and the St. Paul - were later donated by Ohio businessman Peter Kuntz. The small fleet provided a place for priests to say Mass, hear confessions, baptize babies and marry couples in remote towns with no Catholic parish. At every stop, people lined up for blocks to tour the novel cars. Soon, dozens of churches sprang up - often with the aid of Catholic Extension grants - in towns and villages visited by the chapel cars.

    In addition to the rail cars, Catholic Extension also created two motor chapels built for mission work. A chapel boat was later added to Extension’s fleet to ply the rivers of some of the country’s most isolated areas.

    Today, the rail-bound chapel fleet has been replaced by four-wheel drive vehicles like the Toyota 4-Runner used by Father Michael Winterer to make the rounds in his 13,000-square-mile parish in southern Utah. Small aircraft, such as the 1974 Cessna 206 piloted by Archbishop Roger Schwietz, OMI, of the Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska, are also part of everyday life in today’s U.S. mission dioceses. Schwietz completed flying lessons with the help of a Catholic Extension grant and now logs some 10,000 miles a year traveling to mission parishes over some of the roughest terrain in the U.S.

    Missionary priests who serve in poor, remote communities throughout the United States can be found celebrating Mass in some unusual places - funeral homes, movie theaters, gas stations, fire stations and ramshackle garages.

Donor money ensures church presence

    To date, Catholic Extension has raised and distributed nearly $400 million to support U.S. mission dioceses. These monies have helped fund construction at 12,000 churches nationwide and have provided salary subsidies for priests, religious and lay workers who minister to Catholics in U.S. mission dioceses. Also funded were:
* grants for fuel, supplies and other basic necessities to enable missionaries to reach and minister to Catholics in isolated U.S. regions;
* seminary education for future priests who are desperately needed in underserved regions of the country;
* grants for religious education and campus ministry programs to spread the Catholic faith to future generations; and
* disaster relief for mission parishes.

    During Catholic Extension’s first 20 years, grants from the organization funded nearly half of all the Catholic churches constructed in the United States.

    In the early 1900s, a pioneer community could build a simple clapboard church for $2,000 to $4,000. These churches sometimes included an attached living space for the priest if he had to travel between outstretched mission stops.

    Parishes without a resident priest have risen to nearly 3,000 of all U.S. parishes.
Lay volunteers have played an important role in mission dioceses. Members of the Sioux nation were among the earliest lay ministers in the Church in the United States. At the turn of the 20th century, a number of Native Americans were empowered as catechists by Jesuit missionaries on U.S. reservations in South Dakota. These early lay ministers included Nicholas Black Elk, whose experiences were recounted in the book, “Black Elk Speaks.

    In recent decades, lay volunteers increasingly have been filling roles previously reserved for priests. These roles include extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, lectors, religious education directors, campus ministers, pastoral associates and administrators.

    In the 40-plus years that he has been a member of the Catholic Extension’s staff, Richard A. Ritter, vice president, has seen some significant changes.

    One major shift that Ritter has observed is the substantial increase in Extension funded projects that assist Hispanic people. “While the Society provides annual grants to dioceses and parishes throughout rural America benefitting people of all origin and ethnicity, we find we’re reaching a growing number of Hispanic people, particularly in the southwestern United States,” he said.

    Asked about his impressions over four decades of service to Extension, Ritter observes, “During many field trips through the years, I have had the opportunity to see, first hand, the face of poverty in America. It’s hard to imagine that there are so many, many impoverished people right here in the United States until you come face-to-face with the drudgery of coping with the reality of meeting basic human needs day after day. I am very gratified that Catholic Extension, which brings the church to some of the most remote pockets of this country, is making a real difference in so many lives,” he said.

    During its most recent fiscal year, Catholic Extension distributed $14.1 million to some 84 dioceses - about 40 percent of all dioceses in the United States.
“People might not know we even have missionaries here,” said Father Stan Bieniek, one of several priests from Poland who serves Hispanic missions in South Texas. “Christian people are living in very poor conditions right here in America. It is as though these are the forgotten people.”

    Just as in Father Kelley’s day, Catholic Extension fills in the gaps. Instead of a national collection in churches, it raises its funds through appeals for projects aimed at helping the “poorest of the poor” of America’s mission parishes.