An Overdue Topic for Updates

In addition to the critical public health crisis of recent months, many people, organizations, and businesses in our communities have experienced serious financial crises as well. With great sensitivity for all that people have been going through in our parishes, nation, and world, we have intentionally minimized discussion of church finances early in the pandemic. We know that those whose household income has dropped cannot contribute as much as they use to. Our main message has been one of gratitude for all those who continued to make contributions to parish collections online, by mail or delivering them by hand. Because of your regular contributions, plus various one-time donations, our parishes have been miraculously seeing around 80-90% of what we would usually receive in offertory each month! Many parishes have seen much worse drops in contributions, so you should be proud of how we all have done sustaining our parishes under very difficult circumstances!

There are two major challenges as we try to finalize each parish budget for this new fiscal year. First, as with your household, it is extremely difficult to forecast both income and expenses in these very uncertain times. Therefore, both of our Parish Finance Councils are advising a conservative projection on parish collections and other income (80% of normal at St. Martha and 85% at St. Mary), while we remain hopeful that more parishioners will be able to return to their prior level of parish support.

The other challenge comes from the shortfall in our offertory and other collections. If it continues at this level it could result in as much as $150,000 total drop in our collaborative’s resources for ministries. Therefore, I have had to make the difficult decision to significantly reduce the hours of our Pastoral Team and other col-laborative staff. These are people who are very dedicat-ed to our parishes and our mission to serve and grow these communities of disciples of Christ. It is my sincere hope that, if the income of the parishes can get closer to normal, we will be able to increase their hours in time for Faith Formation and other fall collaborative activities. Again, we all understand that those who have less income cannot give what they used to. We need to support one another in our community, especially those who are going through more hardships than ourselves. We will need to continuously review our spending in light of our income throughout the coming year.

There will be a “part two” of this column in the near future, since you also need to know about our commitment to the ministries of the Catholic Appeal for our archdiocese and the status of our building/maintenance collections. While we will never make money our primary focus, the resources available are an important factor in what ministries we are able to do.