Word: ruralization
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This Catholic dilemma traces back to the shortage of priests when America's first great flood of Catholic immigrants-the Irish-arrived in the wake of the 1845 potato famine. Rather than have these largely rural Irish scatter to country districts and lose their faith through lack of contact, the American hierarchy under the leadership of New York's Archbishop John Hughes decided it would be better to concentrate them in the cities, where the relatively few priests available could cope with the crowds...
...evangelize "No-Priest-Land"-i.e., rural America-in the same way "as a foreign missionary approaches the heathen," largely through a new order of priests called the Home Missioners of America...
...support sisterhoods trained to visit scattered Catholic families in rural districts and keep them in closer touch with the Church...
America, the Jesuit weekly, has put the problem with equal bluntness: "Without rural life, in a couple of generations we shall begin closing a fair-sized proportion of our city churches...
...Conference wants to keep present Catholics on the farms, encourage city Catholics to move to the country, make converts in the rural areas. To these ends it applauded plans...