Hello, Everyone!
I want to take some time to thank you with all my heart for your loving encouragement during my time away. It’s hard for me to leave…I’m very “work” oriented and the fact that so many of you encouraged me to go and celebrated that I took time away was a blessing. I thank you! I had a GREAT time! I got to see my Tigers, meet Willie Horton and Jim Leyland…it was amazing. Now, on to business…DSA is here!
Once a year the diocese asks each parish to step up and support the work that it does. I know that for many, this can be an irritant or come across as a chore, but I hope and pray that we all respond with great generosity. For all the parishes in our diocese, we are able to function because of the process of taking up a collection each week. This allows us to pay our employees, as well as cover their insurance. It allows us to care for the poor and needy. It allows us to educate kids, to minister to those in need. We can do this because we have a collection every week.
The diocese has those exact same needs and yet cannot/does not do a weekly collection. Instead, they count on us to take up one big collection each year so that they can minister and help each parish minister. Beyond that, they have ministries that no individual parish has because no individual parish could possibly pull it off. I’m going to share just two of the many:
Education of Seminarians
This is a big one. If a young man discerns that God may be calling him to the priesthood, it’s quite the process. It takes a minimum of eight years, usually nine or ten. To educate a priest, you need professors that have unique degrees and frankly, there just aren’t many people with those degrees. Beyond that, a seminarian should be in community with other young men discerning priesthood.
You put these together and you have a very expensive, but necessary, education process and it’s literally ONLY possible through our DSA collection.
Caring for the financial and business needs of all the parishes
This one gets lost in the mess, but we have been absolutely blessed by the diocese during the last two years in ways that would not have been possible without the success of DSA collections. When I got here, I found we were significantly behind in our insurance payments and frankly, our math told us it was going to take some time to get this done. The diocese stepped in and helped us to work it all out and the great news is that we caught up in less than two years. To be clear, if it wasn’t for the diocese helping us, we would’ve been in some longer term trouble than we were.
Another point is that DSA allows the diocese to employ experts who assist all of our parishes in their work. For us, building the Church demonstrated to us all just how vital that is. Because of DSA, we had access to numerous consultants and construction experts that would’ve cost us more money than we had. Because of DSA, we had access to the collective wisdom of all parishes in our diocese that have built things or that were in the process of doing things. Because of DSA, we were able to secure bridge loans that no bank would’ve given us.
Beyond this, the diocese does all the things you hope she’d do: caring for the poor, the immigrant, the needy.
I could go on and on, guys…I genuinely feel a holy and joyful burden to share with everyone I can what a blessing the diocese is for us and it’s my hope that by sharing this all with you, you get a sense of why it’s such a good thing to support the DSA.
As for me, I am making my pledge this week. I ask you to do the same.
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