Greetings in Christ, all!
I missed you all last week at the Priest’s Convocation. We had a marvelous time and I learned a lot. I want to take this time to share some of the things I learned with you.
The focus of a lot of the talks in the beginning was with the consulters that the diocese is using to help us. The Consulters come to us from the Catholic Leadership Institute, a great group of professionals who volunteer their time and expertise to help the Church be more accountable, more intelligent with the goods entrusted to it, etc.
Through a grant from the Lily Foundation, they are in our diocese now, helping us look at the future.
As you can imagine, there has been a growing need in the Church to take a good hard look at our resources and our future and redraw the entire thing. We have fewer and fewer priests and, while we have fewer Catholics going to Church than usual, we have more Catholics in the world and they come to us with their needs, too. Catholics are giving less time and less money, but the needs have grown. For our part, we priests are not trained to be CFOs and CEOs, yet that is a very large part of our jobs. Our failures in these areas can be epic.
So, what do we do with all these realities?
This is where it gets exciting. The diocese, working with the Catholic Leadership Institute, has formed a panel of priests and lay leaders from all over the diocese. The CLI is collecting data from God’s People and, when they have that data collected and sorted, they will present it to this panel and things will, I assume, change radically for our diocese.
This is not something to fear, but something to rejoice in. I believe with all my heart that these changes are vital to the future of the Catholic Church in the US. We need to be more prudent with what we have so that we can serve all who come to us. Priests need to be faithful to their Sacramental Ministry and listen to God’s People and their experience in financial and personnel matters.
So, some of you will be contacted at some point and be asked to fill out surveys and questionnaires and other such things. This will be happening at every parish. Please be honest and forthright with your concerns and considerations and trust that all of this is going to end with a better system of governance within our diocese. I honestly haven’t been this excited about the future of our Church in some time.
I could go on and on and I usually do, but I need to wrap it up.
Basically, the point is this: please pray for our diocese and our leadership within the diocese. Please pray that we are brave and trusting and ready to do whatever God calls us to. Please continue to come to Church on Sunday and pray with us. Please be grateful for the gift of our faith and live it well.
I thank God every day that I get to be your priest.
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