ARTICLES

Ministry in Appalachia: ‘An affair of the heart’

By Jean Denton
Special to The Catholic Virginian

Like an exposed nerve, Appalachia continues to be a living, pulsating culture where the Holy Spirit has presided since the beginning of time, offering a place of challenge and nurture for the Christian Gospel. It’s a place where, for recent generations, the riches of the mountain land and the spirit of the people have struggled against exploitation and poverty in the face of God’s providence.

Since the early 1970s some 40 women religious have made southwest Virginia’s Appalachian region their home. They came in response to God’s call to serve the poor.

Their arrival was sometimes puzzling to the local people who wondered why they were moving in when so many people seemed to be trying to get out of Appalachia. But the fact that they were willing to stake their lives here “was a witness,” recalled Sister Martha Meyer, RSM, who serves in Tazewell County.

The region includes part of 26 Catholic dioceses in the eastern United States. The Richmond Diocese is one of them, located at the center of the linear socio-geographic stratum that runs from Mississippi to upstate New York.

Although the Glenmary Missions began serving here in the 1930s, the most significant call to Catholic ministry in the region came in the form of the landmark “This Land is Home to Me,” A Pastoral Letter on Powerlessness in Appalachia issued by the Catholic bishops of the region in 1975.

By that time a few of the nuns already had come, drawn by their religious communities’ rededication to serving the poor.

Indeed, a few of them, notably Notre Dame Sister Beth Davies and priests and other missioners working in the area, helped develop and write — in beautiful poetic style — the bishops’ pastoral.

After its publication there was an influx of sisters from various orders into Appalachia in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They also trickled in, singly and in pairs to different parts of this diocese’s Region 10 — mostly communities in the coalfields where poverty and health issues were key, interwoven with serious environmental concerns.

“Most who came, stayed,” said Sister Jaculyn Hanrahan, CND, who arrived in Hurley in 1982.

Sister Jackie, as she’s best known, explained that the time was ripe for a “Catholic presence” in the region — even though Catholics were, and remain, a definite religious minority there.

Not long before, in the mid-1960s, the Second Vatican Council document “Renewal of Religious Life” had urged religious communities to examine the foundations and basic charisms of their organizations to determine “if it was still valid, if something new was needed or even if it needed to end,” she explained.

Noting that part of the nature of religious orders is “to meet the needs of the times,” Sister Jackie pointed out that many communities discerned a call to disband.

“But many re-wrote their constitutions and re-dedicated themselves to a life of prophetic ministry and serving the poor,” she said.

So when “This Land is Home to Me” came out, “there was a readiness,” she said, among these communities of religious women to find places to minister to the poor. The testimony of Appalachian people in “listening sessions,” which was a basis for the pastoral letter, gave voice to the dire need in the region.

“It had a resonance for some of the nuns and so they came,” Sister Jackie asserted.

Sister Jackie, now director of the diocesan Appalachian Office of Justice and Peace, went on to explain that they came, not to work in Catholic parishes, but to serve the struggling Appalachian communities — a mostly non-Catholic population.

“When I came, the locals defined Catholics as those who do something for you and don’t ask for something back,” she recalled.

The sisters also were welcomed by the small Catholic communities with whom they shared mutual spiritual support.

“There was a hospitality with the Catholics who were here — with that kind of courageous spirit they have,” she said.

The region, as the bishops suggested, yearned for a Catholic presence by virtue of “our traditions, our social teaching and the heritage of our religious communities,” Sister Jackie pointed out.

“It’s an affair of the heart,” she said, “that started with a call before we came. It’s why we stay — we come with a religious congregation behind us (through its mission).”

But when these women first arrived in the region few had specific ministries or even agendas waiting for them.

Most, like Sister Clare McBrien, were directed by their religious communities to come to the region and live among the people and then to determine their needs and how best to serve. Meanwhile they were expected to be financially self-sufficient.

Sister Clare, who came from New York City, began her time in rural Wythe County by working in a series of part-time jobs while she learned gardening and canning from her neighbors.

She soon determined that matters of land and environment were crucial in her area and went to work for the Appalachian Office of Justice and Peace as an ecological educator.

Some of the programs created by the women religious who came in the ‘70s have become well established and are highly acclaimed by their own and neighboring communities which access them.

Of note is the Advocate Center in Norton. It was founded 25 years ago and operated under the guidance of Dominican Sisters Margaret Flynn and Beth Jaspers, and provided direct health and housing assistance to low income families.

The Addiction Education Center for counseling and New Beginnings, a residential treatment center, were begun by Sister Beth Davies and the late Sister Elizabeth Vines, CDP, in Lee County, as well as St. Mary’s Health Wagon, Inc., a Remote Area Medical (RAM) unit that serves the indigent of Dickenson, Buchanan and Wise counties.

Many other ministries and social services have been established through the efforts of the sisters in collaboration with the local people in the communities of Appalachia in this diocese (Buchanan, Dickenson, Wise, Bland, Tazewell, Lee and Wythe counties). They have been developed to be community based and self-sustaining.

They include health services and clinics, centers for substance abuse and domestic abuse, educational programs, financial assistance, environmental protection and advocacy, sustainable agricultural programs, legal assistance and prison ministry, to name a few.

Apparently the experience of moving from ministry to ministry, serving where they were called by the needs of the community, was typical for many of the sisters.

Sister Jackie explained, “You’re able to commit your whole life here. It’s not just what you do.

“The people have no concept of what a nun is. They know you for who you are and who God needs you to be. “

“The dream of the mountains’ struggle, the dream of simplicity and of justice like so many other repressed visions is, we believe, the voice of The Lord among us.” —“This Land is Home to Me” (1975)

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