Cullman County, Alabama is indeed an amazing place, probably not that many Catholics per capita — I would be (pleasantly) surprised if the Catholic population were over ten percent — but a lot of Catholic institutions of various types packed into a fairly small place. I visited Christ the King Abbey (TLM) twice before it became affiliated with the diocese. I wouldn’t mind having a place like that close by, for the TLM every Sunday.
Two cautions I would give about almost any small town — first, you will run into the “you’re either from here, or you’re not from here” phenomenon, and secondly (and somewhat closely related), in a tight job market, locals have a huge advantage, precisely because they are locals. In other words, you’re never going to have a potential employer say “well, I can either hire you, or I can hire Cousin Joe, but you know what, I’d rather hire you instead”. (Even if he doesn’t like Cousin Joe, he has other cousins as well as people he’s known all his life.) There are only a handful of places in this country where newcomers and locals are on fairly equal footing — NYC, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, possibly Chicago, Austin, Seattle, or Houston. Even in some larger cities, “what school did you go to?” means high school, not college.
Just as some idle reverie one time, I was casually searching for small towns, in areas of the US with low crime and good schools, and I happened upon one very small Midwestern town that was soliciting retirees to come there and live. The local school website was very impressive, and it came across as the type of town where, as the saying goes, you don’t have to lock your front door. Then I read up some on the state’s culture and discovered a common regional adage — “where do you go to make friends in X? - kindergarten”. I then said to myself “oh, now I see, on the one hand, you want people to move there, but on the other hand, no matter how long you live there, how hard you try, you’ll never really be accepted, you’ll never really be ‘one of them’”. Good to know. I’ll look elsewhere. It could get a little chilly there.
I mention these things not to trash anyone — I have deliberately not mentioned the city or state in the above example — but just to shed some light upon the pitfalls of “moving someplace blind”. I’ve done it more than once, and I had to learn the hard way. “Looking for a Catholic place” would not necessarily be free of these pitfalls.
