Progressive Catholicism in the Rural Church?

In an unexpected turn of events, I find myself living in my childhood home. Before the pandemic hit, I hoped to find a job that would allow me to stay in New York City among a community of seminarians, activists, and artists. Instead, I’m working remotely from my lilac-painted bedroom, searching for other part-time work that will allow me to build an independent life post-graduation.

I am from Castleton, Vermont, a town of just under 5000 people. I love so many things about Vermont: the land is beautiful, the people are independent, and we have a rich, complex history. That said, I was desperate to get out of here when I finished high school. As an awkward, nerdy, artsy kid, I never fit in. I felt like no one cared about the same things as me.

To briefly dispel stereotypes about Vermont: we are a blue state with red veins, the site of encounter (and sometimes collision) between idealistic, progressive out-of-staters moving “back to the land” and independent-minded, more conservative Vermonters who have been here for generations. There are many poor and working class people here. The opioid epidemic has hit us hard. I am from a purple pocket of the state, and I have a deep, complicated relationship with the place and its people.

It wasn’t until graduate school in New York City that I got involved in the women’s ordination movement and other leftist and progressive Catholic communities. I found WOC, CTA, the Catholic Worker, and the Benincasa Community. My friends and I church-hopped between Jesuit and other progressive churches, RCWP Masses, and Dignity liturgies. We complained that it’s hard to find progressive Catholic community in NYC, and that’s true: though I love the city, it’s too big and too easy to feel alone in the crowd. Compared to other places, though, it has a wealth of resources; there is no Catholic community tailored to my spiritual needs in rural Vermont.

People in big cities don’t always understand what church looks like in rural communities. My home church has been shrinking for decades, devastated by the diocese’s sex abuse crisis, various unpopular priests, and the aging population of an economically depressed area. An average Sunday sees forty people in a sanctuary that can seat hundreds. Churches in New York employee dozens of people to produce a professional musical experience, teach religious education, and run social service programs, but my church doesn’t even have a priest on site. Two priests from a religious order live in another town and drive around to serve four rural parishes in our county. My mom doesn’t get paid to play guitar and lead the choir. I helped teach religious education to younger kids when I was in high school student, a sweet but haphazard community and process. We operate on a shoestring.

Since I don’t know how long I’ll be here, I’ve been wondering what it would look like to build progressive Catholic community in a small town. My dad told me the other day that he’d been chatting with an elderly woman who serves on church committees with him. She shared a bit about her experience with Catholicism: despite her dedication to the parish, she is very angry at a Church that has alienated her gay daughter.

My small-town church is not a conservative church: it is an apolitical church. I rarely hear about current events from the pulpit. I know that there are people who would be open to church reform – and others who wouldn’t be open, just like anywhere else. But there are so many concrete obstacles to creating progressive Catholic community.

In NYC, you can take public transportation anywhere. In Vermont, you need a car. To attend events for a niche audience, you may need to drive several hours – even if your destination isn’t very far as the crow flies. Rural broadband access is sparse in some areas, an inequity heightened during the pandemic. Even parishes, the building blocks of Catholic community, are in disarray. Our churches aren’t staffed with justice coordinators; my church doesn’t have coffee hours anymore, much less book clubs. And the progressive Catholic movement has a class problem: we are a movement populated by people with graduate degrees, and my area doesn’t have so many of those people. Our economic plight has led to “brain drain,” or more accurately stated, the young people privileged enough to access higher education have left for the cities. Many people around here have never been exposed to expansive ideas about religion and justice. I certainly wasn’t. My education in the Catholic left came in fits and starts, mostly through books and Google searches. Finally, of course, there just aren’t as many people. There are 600,000 people in the state of Vermont and 1.6 million on the island of Manhattan.

Some small towns have Catholic Worker farms or progressive retreat centers, connections to the wider Catholic world. Many don’t. We can’t even picket our cathedral because we are hours from a cathedral.

It’s easy to identify this disconnect and harder to remedy it. That disconnect goes both ways: movements for Catholic reform have much to learn from the rural church. We can learn from groups like the Catholic Committee of Appalachia. We can learn from the issues presented at the Synod on the Amazon. We can learn from the faithful who stick around in lackluster parishes because they don’t have the option to take a subway and “church shop” for the most liberal option – and we can learn from those who leave because their parish stifles them.

But what can we, a national movement for women’s ordination, give to the rural Church? How can we build community there? Rural organizing is a struggle for any movement, but there are things that we could do. Strengthening our class analysis would be a good step, as the urban/rural divide in this country is rife with class tension. We could empower locals with resources and ideas tailored to rural communities. And we could continue to use the plight of the rural parish as evidence for our cause. This is where the priest shortage is perhaps most evident. Many rural churches are truly run by women. Small-town churches are the grassroots of the Church.

Our movement cannot be an urban movement. It must soak deep into the fabric of the Church, spreading to every little country church in the hills and valleys of this country. It must keep its eye on the urban/rural tensions that wrack our political landscape. We must build in the small towns so that young people don’t need to leave home to experience a God who loves them. I experience God in the woods and fields of my home, and I know that I can experience Her in my Church, too.