Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

        We’ve sure had some beautiful September days!  This is a great time of the year as we get to enjoy the warmth and sun of summer for a few more days.  And the first hints of Fall are already appearing, especially in our cool evenings and the first tinges of color in our trees.  These are awesome days!

        This past week, we had our monthly All Council Meeting, followed by the individual meetings of the Parish Council, the School Council, the Finance Council, and the Religious Education Council.  All four of our main leadership councils have been working on goals for themselves and for our Parish family for the next year.  This is a most-exciting time for our Parish family.  We’re not the little, start-up parish that we used to be, just a few years ago.  St. Maria Goretti Parish has grown and matured and taken more and more of a leadership role in our Diocese.  We’ve still got a lot of growing and learning to do, but make no mistake about it, we’ve come a long way.  We’ve got a beautiful new church building.  We’ve got an extremely successful Catholic school.  We have one of the most thorough and complete Parish-based Religious Education programs around.  We’re paying down our debt and planning for the future.  There are more of us than ever before.  Our levels of Mass attendance and participation in Parish programming are going up, and they are some of the highest levels of participation in the area.  Our Parish has produced six seminarians: three for our Diocese and three for religious orders, one young lady who is a candidate for the religious life in the convent, and one of the Diocese’s most outstanding Permanent Deacons, with a second awesome candidate for the Permanent Diaconate just starting his formation.  Two parishioners, Pamela Storms-Barrett and Evelyn Burton, work for the Bishop in major Diocesan leadership positions.   Mary Ann McLean serves the Bishop and the Diocese on the Diocesan Finance Council.  The little mission parish that grew up in the shadow of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, is now a major Parish in its own right.  We have been extraordinarily blessed by our Lord!  And we still have so much more left to do!  So, what do we do now?  What are our goals at this point in our Parish’s history?

        Goal number one is to get rid of the debt from the construction of our church.  Because of it’s significant financial impact on everything else we are doing, we’ve got to get rid of our debt and the interest payments that are strangling us as a Faith community.  We’ve got so many other great things to do and that all of us want to see happen, that can’t happen as long as we are saddled with this debt.  We have again started to make a major assault on that debt, with Fruitful Harvest 2008 and the new “Angels in Action” campaign.  In the next two months, ALL OF US are going to get the chance to help out with this.

         Secondly, we’ve got to continue to reach out to new members.  We need to be witnesses for our Faith and our Faith community.  There are many people out there with us every day, both in-active Catholics and others who should be Catholic, who need our good example and our guidance to get them into the Church.  Far too often, we don’t take seriously as Catholics, the Gospel imperative to evangelize.  We must be witnesses for Christ!  And that means that we need to know our Faith, and be able to explain it and defend it.  Religious education for all of us is a goal that we must meet!

         Thirdly, our communal prayer at our Masses must continue to be refined, so that every person attending Mass at St. Maria Goretti is worshipping in full, active, and conscious participation at all times.  We need everybody involved in the Mass.  We need more Mass ministers in all of the liturgical functions.  And in making this more and more of priority, we are also convinced that the number of candidates for religious vocations will also continue to go up.

         Finally, we do need to expand the school, but the truth of the matter is that all of our ministries and programs are also going to need to be expanded.  We should be able to do more with more people and more resources.  We must constantly be striving to get more people involved and finding their place and their ministry within the Church.

         Whew!  We’ve got a lot of work to do!  And I include YOU in that “we”.  Let’s stay busy!

In Christ,

Fr. Kevin

 “He cannot have God for his Father who refuses to have the Church for his mother.”

-  St. Augustine of Hippo