My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

A Blessed Mother’s Day to all our mothers on this Mother’s Day Weekend.  We are blessed with all our mothers for showing us the love of God through all they do for their families.  Blessings for all our mothers.

 

Mary Our Queen was recognized by Heartland Hope Mission as The Outstanding Church for 2026.  This is thanks to Mary Parizek and the devoted volunteers of our Human Needs Committee whose work to care for the less fortunate in our community continues to make a difference.  We are blessed by Mary and all our volunteers for making the difference through their service and caring for others.

 

Thank you to all who made time to help much and spring clean our campus last Sunday at Mary Our Queen and on Saturday at St John Vianney.  Our campuses do look beautiful.  We moved the Angel statue at St John Vianney to the main entrance of our Church and had to remove all the bushes in the Angel garden as we have not been able to maintain it (the Angel garden was overgrown with weeds due to the lack of attention given to it).  Hopefully we will have installed new sprinkler lines and sod installed in that area to make maintenance of the area easier by the time you read this column or soon.  We also planted some new plants in various areas of our campuses or transplanted some plants to improve our campuses’ beauty.

 

We concluded our Religious Education programs at both St John Vianney and Mary Our Queen on Wednesday with Mass and May Crowning.  We would like to thank our Religious Education Directors, staff and our catechists for all they do in sharing the gift of faith with our students.  This summer our Family of Parishes will be offering  Vacation Bible School and the Tutus Tuus Program in the months of June and July.  Please see our bulletin for more information.

 

In a few weeks’ time, we will be concluding our school year at Mary Our Queen.  We are grateful for all who made this year a success, especially our administration, our teachers and staff and not forgetting all our wonderful volunteers whose countless hours of service made a tremendous difference for our community

 

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.

 

Blessings this Easter Season,

Fr Marc

 

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