Glenmary Home Missioners is a Catholic society of priests and brothers who, along with their co-workers, are dedicated to establishing a Catholic presence in rural areas and small towns of the United States where the Catholic Church is not yet effectively present. Glenmary is the only religious community devoted exclusively to serving the spiritually and materially poor in the rural United States home missions. Today, its members staff missions and ministries throughout Appalachia and the Deep South.

Glenmary was founded by Father William Howard Bishop, a priest of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. For more than 20 years, Father Bishop labored in a small Catholic faith community in rural Maryland, but he witnessed needs beyond his parish. He saw the thousands of poor, neglected, and forgotten people who inhabited rural America. He saw what the Catholic Church had failed to see — that there were vast areas in the United States that were starving for the Bread of Life. Armed with a vision to feed them spiritually, Father Bishop worked relentlessly. His efforts to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to rural America culminated in 1939, when he founded the Glenmary Home Missioners, headquartering the Society in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati at the invitation of Archbishop John T. McNicholas.

The first mission sites for the newly formed Society were in the rural areas of Adams County. Missioners served at these sites for over 60 years, establishing church communities, addressing social problems, and working with other churches ecumenically to further the Gospel teachings of Jesus Christ.