Retreat helps rural pastors reach out to their people

 
By STEFFANNIE KOENEMAN
Communications Director
Priesthood is not for the faint of heart.
Especially not for rural priests, who in addition to the workload of all priests, deal with being one of just a few if not the only priest in an area.
The “parish” may include a main church in the heaviest populated community; then there can be several missions that also need Masses, sacra­ments, meetings and visits. The missions may be spread out across miles.
Via Christi Father Richard Kusugh is the only priest in the La Paz Vicariate. This vicariate in­cludes 4,000 square miles of small communities, large and small farms and approximately 20,601 people. Each Sunday, he celebrates Mass at the home base of Sacred Heart Parish in Parker. Then he is in his car traveling to Wenden, Quartzsite, Poston and Ehrenberg.
The town of Parker is a little over 267 miles from Tucson, and about 154 miles from Phoenix, sitting close to the Arizona border with Califor­nia. In all, Father Richard travels at least 200 miles on Sundays driving to celebrate Mass at the mission churches.
“It’s a cakewalk. I do it without thinking,” he said, joking that his car seems to drive itself to these distant locations because of the number of times he has traveled the route.
He has been serving as the only priest in La Paz County since he was assigned to minister there in 2014.
He and Father Martin Atanga, pastor at Our Lady of Lourdes in Benson, recently attended a retreat for priests serving in rural areas. The re­treat was hosted by Catholic Rural Life, a nation­al organization created in 1923 with the mission of “strengthening and sustaining the Church in the countryside by educating and inspiring lead­ers and advocating on their behalf.”
Fathers Richard and Martin were participants in the inaugural “Thriving in Rural Ministry” retreat held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in early November.
“This was a retreat for all of us that work in the rural areas of the Diocese,” Father Richard said. “There were probably 19 of us from 10 dioceses.”
Catholic Rural Life designed the retreats to “provide spiritual refreshment, rural ministry insights and support, individual leadership devel­opment, and fraternity with other priests serving rural communities.”
Renewing and reviving rural pastors were other goals of the retreat, which offered time for building friendships and networking among other rural priests and to help ease the strain some may feel being alone in their work.
“One of the trends we see in rural areas across the country is the increasing chal­lenge for pastors cover­ing multiple parishes over long distances,” the organization writes in its retreat informa­tion. “This trend has led to more pastors feeling more iso­lated and emotionally stretched. Pastors in rural communities, even those serving only one parish, have told us of their sense of isolation and their need of peer fellowship and fraternity to help them both over­come some of the unique challenges in pastoral ministry and to expand upon the many opportuni­ties found in ministering in a rural setting.”
During his retreat, Father Richard, who is from Nigeria, encountered a long visit in snow bound Minnesota for the first time.
“We got there and it was a high of 12 (degrees) and a low of 2 degrees,” Father Rich­ard said. “The good thing is my parishioners prepared me. … One of the parishioners said, ‘Well Father, the only good thing now is the flights are cheap.’”
He also discovered during conversations with rural priests from other dio­ceses that he held the prize for longest commute distances. Not really a surprise for him given his time in Parker.
Father Richard said he participated in many discussions about life with farmers and dairy workers and some of the challenges he and the Catholics in his area face in their work and spiritual lives. In addition, he said that no matter where the rural priests minister, there are many common challenges they face, such as working with farmers who have lost or had to sell family farms they had owned for generations and the ensuing depression and even suicide that is the result of that loss.
“I took a number of things from this (retreat). One, I am not alone. Secondly, the retreat gives me a better way to work with my farmers,” Father Richard said. “It opens a whole new ministry with them. I am already thinking of having a new liai­son and have all of the farmers (come) together into one block to do some kind of an outreach partnership with the farmers.”
Father Martin said he was glad he attended the retreat because, “it was something new. It wasn’t just sitting down listening to people speak.”
The focus was prayer, but personal sharing af­terward is what really made a difference for him, he said.
“There were practical ideas,” he added, “showing us ways to reach out to our people.”
Instead of telling parishioners they have to pray more, the lessons from the retreat directed him to join the people in prayer and help them develop their own prayer habits, he said.
“We need to pray with them, to make room in our lives to pray with them and to teach them to pray.”
Father Richard explained that the people he ministers to live in areas of vast acres of farmland. While there are still smaller family farms, the area has become home to extremely large farms being op­erated by Arab companies. Appar­ently, it is easier to farm in La Paz County and ship produce to their nation than to farm overseas.
“The conference was very informative, especially about ways to recognize farmers more,” Father Richard said, adding later, “It is very easy for people to think ‘God doesn’t love me because I lost my ranch’ (or) ‘God doesn’t love me because I lost my dairy farm.’”
Recent media reports say that farm foreclosures reached a three-year high in the last quarter of 2019.
In addition, Father Richard said the retreat also zeroed-in on Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the environment , Laudato Si (“Care for our Common Home”), and how there is a strong connection between farmers, ranchers and the earth, and the need to protect their environment and their work to provide food to others.
“What farmers do is a continu­ation of God’s creation,” he said. “There is a whole spirituality to that that I didn’t see until this.”
He said that he returned from the retreat hoping to develop ways to encourage more men in the area to come together. He said he had heard about one priest that started a rosary group, short and simple, lasting just 30 minutes. So far, the group has grown from 15 to 70 men.
“All the women in the parish, they make their husbands go,” Fa­ther Richard said. “I am so going to start that in my parish.”
Father Martin has begun a group in his parish to gather for morning prayer, helping partici­pants learn how to offer the liturgy of the hours on their own.
“We need to encourage them not to depend on a priest or a dea­con or nun to lead them in prayer,” he said.