My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We celebrate the Fourth Sunday of Easter this weekend, Good Shepherd Sunday. In the Gospel reading, we hear Jesus speaking about the role of the shepherd. This Gospel reading takes place after Jesus healed a man born blind who was later cast out by the Pharisees because of his belief in Jesus. We are invited to be open to the voice of our Good Shepherd Jesus who has vested interest in each one of us. This is seen through the Cross where Jesus fought evil with love to tell us how much Jesus cares for us. In the Easter mysteries, we continue to hear in the readings how Jesus came back to gather all His disciples to Himself so that He can build up their lives and send them forth as shepherds to care for His people. In 1964, Pope Paul VI established a World Day of Prayer for Vocations to coincide with Good Shepherd Sunday. We invite you to pray for vocations and to pray for priests as we too are imperfect people following the call of Jesus to care for His flock.
We celebrated First Communion with our second graders the last two Sundays in our Family of Parishes. We are grateful for all who journeyed with them as they made their First Communion.
We have finalized our budgets for both Mary Our Queen and St John Vianney with our Finance Committees and will present it to our Parish Councils for approval. The budgets will be published in our Bulletin sometime in October together with our end of year reports. Our Financial year begins July 1st and concludes on 30th June the following year.
One of our priorities at Mary Our Queen, now that we have improved the benefits and insurance for our staff, is to focus on the compensation of our teachers. We have fallen behind our neighboring Catholic schools and our local public-school districts. This gap is not just a number—it presents a growing challenge to retaining the outstanding educators we have and attracting new talent to our school community. Our hope is to invest in our teachers who have provided strong academic growth that helped define our School.
The main priority for St John Vianney is to retire our Parish debt that we incurred with the renovating of our Church and the building of our narthex, offices and Parish Hall. We have come a long way in bringing down our debt with the Capital Campaign that was initiated by Fr Reiser through his Christ in His Glory with all the Saints Icon series.
We continue to make improvements and updates to our Parish facilities. There will be more projects that will be mentioned in my Pastor’s column the next few weeks in our Family of Parishes.
Also beginning this fall, we will be publishing the activities and finances of all our major groups in our Family of Parishes. This will provide details on all that they have done and continue to do for our Family of Parishes. This will also provide an opportunity for anyone who is expressing interest in joining, but hesitate due to uncertainty, to be able to learn more about our groups and programs so that you are able to make the right investment of your time, heart and faith.
There is an Angel statue that was donated to St John Vianney several years ago. A little prayer garden was created around that statue. Unfortunately, due to the lack of attention that was given to that prayer garden, it had been overgrown with weeds. Given the lack of ability to manage that prayer garden, we will be moving that statue to a different location on our campus and have all the bushes in that area removed. We will then have grass planted in that area. This will enable us to maintain our grounds a little easier.
Blessings this Easter Season,
Fr Marc
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