Join me in welcoming Fr. Dan Dorsey to Holy Family Catholic Church this weekend! Fr. Dorsey is the President of the Glenmary Home Missioners. He will help us see how the Glenmary Missioners provide the Bread of Life to so many of our sisters and brothers, who while impoverished in body are so very often rich in soul!
Glenmary was founded in 1939 by Father William Howard Bishop, a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Fr Bishop was given an extraordinary gift: the ability to see. He saw the thousands of poor, neglected and forgotten people who inhabited rural America. He saw what the Church had failed to see – that there were vast areas in the United States that were starving for the Bread of Life. Armed with this gift of sight, Father Bishop worked relentlessly. He built a school. He published and edited several newsletters in order to bring rural America’s plight to the awareness of “city dwellers.” He organized a cooperative. He was a founding member and later president of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. He started a 4-H Club for the children of his parish. His efforts to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to rural America ultimately culminated in 1939 when he founded the Glenmary Home Missioners.
What exactly was it that made this common man so exceptional? William Howard Bishop, first of all, possessed a hope: “that the backwoodsmen, the mountaineers, the farm tenants, sharecroppers and day workers might one day eat the Bread of Truth.” He also had a vision: “A flower is small, like the small, isolated groups that we minister to, like the little children. So small a flower is easily overlooked on the roadside. You hardly see it as you pass by. But pick it up and examine it; it becomes a thing of beauty; so, too, the country parish and the country child.”
Finally, William Howard Bishop had a dream: “We have Christ with us every day. We have drunk of the Water of Life. Should we hesitate to show the world where He is to be found? Should we hesitate to pray that prayer which was so dear to Christ’s heart, and pray it aloud so that all who have ears may hear, “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father are in me, and I in Thee; that they may be one in Us.” https://glenmary.org
The Glenmary Home Missioners of today carry on Father Bishop’s vision to bring the Bread of Life to those who hunger for it. Fr Dorsey’s visit this weekend is the first of the annual Archdiocese of Indianapolis Summer Mission Appeals.
Please be generous in your support of their missionary efforts.
Exodus 90 will begin August 4 – the Feast of St John Vianney – and end on November 1 – Solemnity of All Saints. If interested, please contact me: frgries@HolyFamilyNewAlbany.org. Our first gathering will be Friday July 30 at 6:15a in the Day Activity Center (DAC).
Holy Family, Protected & Led by Joseph, Pray for us.
~ Fr Jeremy M. Gries