The Arrow's Path

Continuing my series on lesser known religious orders in the Catholic Church, I thought I would do one closer to my heart: the Glenmary Home Missioners . If you have never lived in either the American South or in rural areas in the US in general, you have probably never heard of this group. To be honest, I had never heard of them until they started a mission in the county seat of my home county in rural East Tennessee many years ago.  By the time the Glenmarians, as they are called, started a little Catholic mission near my home town, I had already moved away from home. In fact, I may have been out in Nebraska and in the Episcopal church by the time this particular mission started. But, after becoming Catholic, when I would go down to visit my parents in Tennessee, I would need somewhere to go to church on Sunday. Turns out the nearest one to my parents' home was in Maynardville, Tennessee. Maynardville was on the other side of the mountain from the home I grew up in. Imagine my su...

 I moderate a Facebook group for Catholic Converts. Someone posed a question today for the ground that I thought was very good. " What was the one thing you learned in RCIA that made such an impact on you, that you knew you had made the right decision in becoming Catholic?" The following was my answer... I don't know if it was so much actually in RCIA but in my personal conversion process as I was doing serious research on what the Catholic Church actually taught. My spiritual director at the time had given me a copy of the Catechism and told me to read it through and see if there were any "deal breakers" and go from there.    There was one series of sections about Catholic social justice in the middle that honestly scared me. Coming from the Episcopal church as clergy where terms like "social justice" were code words for extreme political agenda that were used to bludgeon opponents, I very much feared that that would be the deal breaker. B...