Pastor's Letter -- January 31, 2021

As we have been working through the parish pastoral plan, we now arrive at the final section, the pastoral priorities. I would like to do an overview this week before looking at the priorities individually.

First off, the language may potentially confuse people to think that with these as “priorities,” nothing else is important to our parish. That is certainly not the case. I wish to reiterate what I stated in the paragraph introducing this plan to the parish: “The goal of this plan is to focus our parish’s efforts to excel in important areas. While we already thrive in some areas, there are many ways we can grow so that we can more fully live out our mission of bringing the good news of Jesus to the world in ways old and new.“ These three priorities denote areas that need growth. It would, of course, not be very effective to focus our time and energy on areas where we already excel. Moving from great to greater is not as useful as moving from good or decent to great.

Secondly, these are priorities not only because they need growth, but because they are critical to the flourishing of our parish and our mission. For example, our numbers are dropping in the U.S.: the next 15 or so years projects losing 8.3 million Catholics in the church. And currently, only about 30% of Catholics go to church weekly. Similarly, 70% of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Thus, evangelization and discipleship are things you will find among our parish priorities. The final priority of accompaniment stresses interconnectedness within the parish, which is also important in maintaining and building a thriving culture.

Our first informational meeting for the implementation team is this week. It will be a sort of orientation to our work. Soon we can finalize the members and solicit other volunteers to form teams for each priority. I wish to thank again CLI (Catholic Leadership Institute) and Tom Lenz who is our hands-on liaison.