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Desert Southwest
The 66th annual National Kateri Tekakwitha Conference was held July 20-24 in Tucson, Arizona, at the Tucson Convention Center. Cultural Day activities were held at the Mission San Xavier Del Bac on the San Xavier Indian Reservation. The church was established in the 1700s by Jesuit missionaries and it features a vast display of intricately carved woodwork. Above: An Hispanic angel watches over the worshippers. Click here for more conference photos and information. (Photo by Father Ray Bucko, SJ) |
Catholic Extension books and videos
The Catholic Church Extension Society has produced a half-hour documentary and pictorial history book to help educate others about Catholic missions in America and Catholic Extensions's 100 year tradition of serving them.
You may purchase a video for $12.95 and a book for $5.95 each. Together the two are $16.95. To order your book or video or to learn more about Catholic Extension, call 1-888-47-FAITH or visit www.catholicextension.org.
The Catholic Communication Campaign's streaming video page is a selection of highlights from "The Invisible Church," produced by Catholic Extension. To view the stories and segments on the CCC's streaming video page, click here. Visitors can view the segments using either Real Player or Windows Media technologies. |
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Catholic Extension: Keeping the faith alive for 100 years
By Catholic Extension
(Editor’s note: The Diocese of Rapid City is one of 84 dioceses aided by Catholic Extension. Archive records show the first contributions arriving in 1906 going to St. Paul Church, Belle Fourche – $650, and Immaculate Conception Church, Bonesteel – $100. Coincidentally, the parish centennial of Belle Fourche is featured on page 17. Archive records indicate that in the past century, Catholic Extension has donated more than $8 million to the diocese and parishes in western South Dakota. Tracing those grant donations shows that every parish in the diocese has benefitted from Extension’s benevolence. On page 5, Msgr. William O’Connell sends his appreciation to Extension. Also on page 5 is a message of thanks from Bishop Blase Cupich and a list of the many ways the diocese has benefitted from the generosity of Extension donors.)
Catholic immigrants flooded the eastern coast of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. They built brick churches and Gothic cathedrals. Families who ventured into America’s Heartland, however, found no church and even fewer priests to serve them. Dirt poor and mortgaged to the hilt, these pioneers could hardly support their families, let alone a Catholic Church. Westward settlers had two choices: keep moving on to wherever they could find a Catholic Church or put down stakes and join whatever church happened to be nearby.
This phenomenon did not go unnoticed by other churches, who started home mission societies as early as 1800. Thirty Congregationalist, Baptist, Methodist and other Protestant organizations poured an estimated $290 million into sending out preachers, distributing literature and starting new missions in small town America in the 19th century.
By the late 1800s, while the Catholic Church was flourishing in the East and Midwest, Catholics in small towns struggled to practice their faith. By some estimates, more than three million small town Catholics had stopped practicing their faith because the Catholic Church was unable to provide them with a priest and a place to worship.
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