Catholics and muskrats," my father once said, "are never found far from water." Throughout Catholic grade school, my classmates and I received maps, distributed by the Louisville archdiocese, illustrating my father's premise. Entitled "No-Priest Land USA," the maps colored in black those American counties lacking a single Catholic priest. The South was, of course, a sea of black, penetrated by peninsular strips of white, where—true to my father's observation—Catholics had settled along the rivers.

The maps of No-Priest Land didn't identify specific towns or parishes, but it was easy to find my hometown: New Haven, Kentucky, one thousand solidly Catholic souls. We were a headland in white, surrounded on three sides by dark Protestant hordes. Right on the county line, we were separated from No-Priest Land by the Rolling Fork River—the width, in summer, of a football field.

Thirty years later the New South has made inroads into this particular frontier of No-Priest Land, but the contrast can still catch the eye of the observant traveler along the old Jackson Highway, US 31E. North of the Rolling Fork, the countryside is sprinkled with convents and monasteries, among them the Trappist monastery at Gethsemane, where Thomas Merton lived and wrote. Catholic homes in New Haven display the range of papist paraphernalia, inside and out: crucifixes, holy water crucibles, blessed palm hung to protect the house from fire, earthquake, tornadoes, disease; statues of the Virgin protected from the elements by upright bathtubs, half-buried