Every year, parishes across the United States take up the Catholic Home Missions Appeal. Because of those generous donations, this year the Appeal will fund over $9 million in grants to nearly 80 dioceses.

Home mission dioceses are located all across the United States, including the Deep South, Appalachia, and the Rocky Mountains. These dioceses lack the resources to provide their faithful with basic pastoral care, including the sacraments, religious education, and ministry training.

The Appeal primarily supports home mission dioceses, that is, those dioceses in the United States that are unable to offer their people the basic pastoral ministries of word, worship, and service without outside help. It may also give grants to other dioceses in the U.S. for particular projects, and to organizations and religious communities engaged in missionary work.

Surprisingly, the Catholic Church is poorly established in many parts of our country, especially Appalachia, the South, the Southwest along the Mexican border, the Rocky Mountain States, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and remote island chains like the Marshalls and the Carolines in the Pacific. Home missions are everywhere that Catholics are few and the Church is fragile.

The collection funds a range of pastoral services, primarily evangelization activities; religious education; ministry training for priests, deacons, religious sisters and brothers, and laypeople, and support of poor parishes across the country.

For more information on the collection for Catholic Home Missions, visit www.usccb.org and search “Home Missions.”