This Land is Home to Me, Part III: Call to Action

(Consider reading This Land is Home to Me here: https://www.ccappal.org/publications)

By Eric Fitts, CCA Member; Bethlehem Farm Executive Director

In October 2025, the West Virginia Council of Churches (WVCC) annual gathering was themed “This Land is still Home to Me” reflecting on the meaning of the first Appalachian Pastoral 50 years later. The WVCC invited the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston to provide three Roman Catholic speakers to reflect on the three parts of the first Pastoral and Bishop Brennan, in turn, asked the Catholic Committee of Appalachia to provide the speakers. This reflection is based on a talk given by Eric to that gathering on Part III of the Pastoral. An excerpt of this speech was printed in the Spring 2026 issue of  “Field for Treasure”, the BFarm newsletter.

1. Intro

I am a founding member of Bethlehem Farm, based near Pence Springs, Summers County, WV. At Bethlehem Farm, I have served in various roles for the past 20 years, primarily as Executive Director.

My own journey is part of the answer to the question I was given: how did Part III of This Land is Home to Me come to be, what does it say, how has it been utilized since its promulgation, and how does this section of the letter apply to my faith and personal vocational experience?

 

1. Credits

I credit those who have informed some of what I share today: the authors of the Appalachian Pastoral letters; speakers at CCA annual gatherings; and Alyssa Pasternak Post, whose dissertation on this topic is an engaging and informative resource on the subject.

 

• How it came to be

This Land is Home to Me was ground-breaking for several reasons. It was a pastoral letter based not on dictating from above, but on listening; by ordained, religious, and lay people working together; from the perspective of those on the margins; not with language too fancy to understand, but with poetic verses, and artwork.

Part III: Facing the Future was born out of the See-Judge-Act methodology. This methodology stems back to 1912 Belgium and the Catholic Action movement, was appropriated in the late 1960s and 1970s by Latin American liberation theologians, and is clearly exemplified in the Appalachian Pastorals. We see by listening and learning about what is good and beautiful and what is evil, especially injustice; we judge this contemporary situation with the eyes of Christ through scripture and tradition; and then we consider what actions these first two steps are calling us into—echoing the words of Jesus in John’s Gospel: “if you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

 

Part III can be seen as a confluence of Vatican II theology, the 1971 document “Justice in the World”, and the influence from a wave of missionaries to Appalachia focused on social justice (this wave of missionaries being embodied by the work of CORA (the Commission on Religion in Appalachia) and CCA (the Catholic Committee of Appalachia)).

Key documents from Vatican II (running from 1962–1965) emphasized a new understanding of the Catholic Church’s role in the world:

• The Church as the People of God, including the laity.
• Dialogue and Inculturation: Missionaries were encouraged to dialogue with local cultures and religions and adapt the Gospel message to the local context.
• And the Church’s responsibility to address contemporary global issues, including poverty, peace, and social justice.

The 1971 World Synod of Bishops document “Justice in the World” powerfully asserted that “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race from every oppressive situation.” This statement officially elevated the pursuit of social justice from a secondary concern to an essential part of the Catholic Church’s evangelizing mission. Missionaries to Appalachia were drawn to service by these currents from within the Catholic Church and by increasing social awareness of Appalachian poverty. It was, in part, the experience of these missionaries with people on the margins, that led them to challenge the bishops of the region to respond not simply by seeing and judging, but also by calling people of good will into action.

1. What does Part III: Facing the Future say?

Part III offers general recommendations for action, including the formulation of an action plan by the Catholic Committee of Appalachia and the creation of centers for reflection.

 

Some excerpts from Part III itself illustrate the whole:

-Hopefully, this letter, itself a product of dialogue, will start a process, wherein the Catholic community can join together with people of good will throughout the region to reflect on and act for a more just society.

-Our searching must carefully balance the following three elements: • closeness to the people; • careful use of scientific resources; • a steeping in the presence of the Spirit

-The people themselves must shape their own destiny.

-First, and most important, in accord with our recommendation from the Synod document, “Justice in the World,” we would like to commend where they exist and recommend where they do not, Centers of Reflection and Prayer, in the service of action, throughout the region.

-We commend where they exist, and recommend where they do not, Centers of Popular Culture, in every parish…so that if a new society is to be born, it will emerge from the grass roots.

-Especially we stress emphasis on the economic questions, for these are the first and most basic questions for all people.

-There will be different views, but let us test them together • with the people, • with one another, • and with the Spirit.

-We especially thank women in the region, for we cannot but note the great role women have played here in the struggle for justice. In the contemporary mission of the Church, the voice and action of women bring a special charism to the struggle for justice.

 

1. How has it been used since its writing?

The immediate response:

Leaders of other Christian churches in Appalachia gave some of the greatest affirmations for the pastoral. Wilburn C. Campbell, an Episcopal bishop in the region, called the pastoral “brilliant and deeply moving.” Official responses also came from other Episcopal and United Methodist representatives. Additionally, CORA unanimously endorsed the pastoral after its publication. Such responses demonstrated the ecumenical sensitivities present in the pastoral’s formulation and content.

 

The longer-term responses to Part III of the pastoral, both within and outside of the region are too numerous to mention, but I will name a few and conclude with my own story.

 

Within Appalachia, responses included the ongoing work of the CCA

• in developing and carrying out the action plan called for in the pastoral,
• in the 1995 publication of the second Appalachian Pastoral “At Home in the Web of Life: A Pastoral Message on Sustainable Communities in Appalachia”, promulgated again by the bishops
• and in the 2015 publication of the third Appalachian pastoral “The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking our Place in the Stories that Shape Us”, which states that when common people retrieve the power to tell their own stories, profound liberation can occur and in them we catch glimpses of a new world.

There were other responses of CCA members, including the CCA Women’s Task Force and its 1988 book In Praise of Mountain Women; the Woodland Community Land Trust begun by FOCIS member Marie Cirillo; the formation of the ecumenical Mt. Tabor Monastery; and the formation of the Big Laurel Learning Center, in which Sr. Gretchen and other religious sisters responded to an invitation from Edwina Pepper to form a community school, which also later resulted in the Web of Life Ecology Center. Mt. Tabor and Big Laurel are examples of one powerful effect of the pastoral, which is the number of people, especially religious men and women, that the pastoral drew to central Appalachia in response to its call. Other responses within the region included the Catholic Conference of WV, the Appalachian Institute at Wheeling Jesuit University, Nazareth Farm, Bethlehem Farm, and the four pastoral centers of the Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston (of which two remain).

 

Outside Appalachia, some responses included:

• The circulation of the pastoral around the world as an example of a church document written poetically, in the vernacular, from the grass-roots, and using the methodology of liberation theology. This was evidenced in part by liberation theologian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara lauding This Land is Home to Me in a speech in the US later in 1975.
• One of the signers of This Land is Home to Me, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, brought the listening methodology and the theology of the “preferential option for the poor and vulnerable” into the writing of the US bishops’ pastoral letters “The Challenge of Peace” in 1983 and “Economic Justice for All” in 1986.
• After this first regional pastoral letter, other regional pastorals followed

 

As I said earlier, my own journey has been, in part, a response to this third section of the pastoral. Like many of the students who have graced our halls over these 20 years at Bethlehem Farm, I first found my way to WV on a service-immersion trip, in my case offered by the Campus Ministry of Loyola University Chicago to a place called Nazareth Farm in Doddridge County, in 1997. After graduating Loyola in 1999, I moved to West Virginia to join the Volunteer Staff community at Nazareth Farm.

 

While at Nazareth Farm, I was introduced to the work of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia (CCA) and the Appalachian Pastorals. I read the first two pastoral letters, with the then 4-year-old At Home in the Web of Life, striking a particular chord with 22-year-old me, especially the section entitled “Sustainable Communities”. I also became a bit of a Nazareth Farm history buff. I knew that Nazareth Farm had been established in 1979 and I stumbled upon a 1978 vision statement for the group. In this vision, two church documents were highlighted: Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, and the then-3-year-old This Land is Home to Me. By the time I was leaving Nazareth Farm, after almost three years, a seed had been planted of another way of living, in sustainable community with others, centered on Christ, in the Spirit of the Acts of the Apostles.

 

In 2003-2005, I was mentor of the Mother Jones House mentoring Wheeling Jesuit University students as they lived in common together and served in East Wheeling, WV. The Pastorals continued to shape my experience of both Appalachia and community life, as I met mentors such as Rev. Jim Ellison and Bishop Don Pitts of Laughlin Memorial Chapel, and Jesuit Frs. Joe Hacala and Jim O’Brien, who had a deep love of the Pastorals. I also first met Mikey Iafrate, then-Campus Minister at WJU, as I brought him on Meals on Wheels routes with me and he brought me into a deeper understanding of the theology behind it. Mikey went on to become deeply involved with CCA, even serving as lead author on the third pastoral before his early death from leukemia.

 

In 2004, a small, committed group of people, including my future wife Colleen and I, came together to dream the Bethlehem Farm vision. This time it was my turn, at 27, to write the vision, which was heavily influenced by my time at Nazareth Farm and in Wheeling, and also by the Pastoral Letters. The 2004 Bethlehem Farm vision began with a quote from This Land is Home to Me, and then read, in part:

 

Bethlehem Farm is a Catholic home repair ministry to be located in Appalachia.  Our ministry will be based on the Gospels and the Catholic Social Teachings, looking to the pastoral letters This Land is Home to Me and At Home in the Web of Life for further inspiration and guidance.  In accord with the Gospels, we will seek to build our daily lives on the cornerstones of prayer, community, service, and simplicity.

 

Bethlehem Farm will be a center of reflection and prayer in the service of action.  We will respond to the needs of our local community and live in solidarity with the people we serve as they lead us into a closer relationship with Christ. 

 

Teaching sustainable practices in line with At Home in the Web of Life has been part of the mission and vision of Bethlehem Farm since the beginning.

 

2005 saw the first Caretakers and first groups arrive at Bethlehem Farm, as Colleen and I were married and moved to Morgantown to study social work and nonprofit management at WVU, moving to Bethlehem Farm full-time in 2007. Beginning in 2011, as things came full circle for me, I participated in the committee planning the 2015 People’s Pastoral, The Telling Takes Us Home: Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us, in which Bethlehem Farm was also mentioned. We have continued to pray with the Appalachian Pastorals with high school and college groups at Bethlehem Farm.

 

As you can see, CCA and the Pastorals have both inspired and nurtured the Bethlehem Farm community, as we at Bethlehem Farm have worked over the past 21 years with over 6,000 week-long service-retreat participants on over 300 service-retreat weeks, working with hundreds of local families completing over $5-million-worth of low-income home repair and solar panel installations. Importantly, each of us then seeds this Gospel lifestyle to the world.

 

But this Part III is called “Facing the Future”, so what does it have to say to us about our present situation, what is it birthing now?

We know our present context all too well: both international and domestic programs that aid the poor and vulnerable are under attack; earth itself is under siege, whether it be pollution or climate chaos, while tax credits for renewable energy installation are being cancelled 10 years earlier than planned. All this despite many politicians claiming they want this to be a Christian nation. In the face of this context, I will mention two Christian efforts that flow from Part III’s call to action in This Land is Home to Me:

• Similar themes of preferential option for the poor and vulnerable can be seen in Pope Leo’s first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor, in which Pope Leo:
  • affirms the biblical and Christian imperative to serve, love, and learn from the poor, linking this service directly to holiness and the very heart of Christ.
  • insists that the poor are not merely objects of charity but “teachers of the Gospel“
  • and emphasizes that care for the poor is essential to Christian life.
• We can also see echoes of the listening sessions in the broader Catholic Church’s renewed emphasis on listening, the synodal approach emphasized by Popes Francis and Leo. This listening is being carried on by CCA in our newest initiative, “Conversations in the Spirit”, which is a process geared toward listening to the voice of the people and challenging our communities and church to act in response. “Conversations in the Spirit” create spaces for deep listening, dialogue, and discernment to lift up local wisdom as a guide for healing and renewal. These conversations generally focus on one topic per circle of people, with topics including: immigration, idolization of money, domestic violence, listening to those who are poor, addiction, care for creation, competing values, burnout, consumerism, and integral ecology.

 

I will close with the prayer that concludes each of the first two Appalachian Pastoral letters:

Dear sisters and brothers, we urge all of you not to stop living, to be a part of the rebirth of communities, to recover and defend the struggling dream of Appalachia itself. For it is the weak things of this world which seem like folly, that the Spirit takes up and makes its own. The dream of the mountains’ struggle, that is, the dream of simplicity and of justice, like so many other repressed visions is, we believe, the voice of The Lord among us. In taking them up again, hopefully the Church might once again be known as

• a center of the Spirit,
• a place where poetry dares to speak,
• where the song reigns unchallenged,
• where art flourishes,
• where nature is welcome,
• where humble people and humble needs come first,
• where justice speaks loudly,
• where in a wilderness of idolatrous destruction the great voice of God still cries out for Life.