Not long ago, the Diocese published the new assignments for priests starting July 1, 2018.  Don’t worry (or cheer) -- I am not going anywhere. I asked to continue to minister to all of you as pastor.  What I did notice, however, was the number of retirements and the number of men being ordained priests this year.  We are going to have around eight priests retire this year, and four men will be ordained priests. You do not need to be a math genius to see that the shortage of priests is continuing to get worse.  The Bishop has told the priests of the Diocese that within the next 10 years, we will go from around 200 priests in active ministry to just over 100.

    This shortage of priests has been a major reason for the Diocesan Planning program, “Faith In Our Future.”  We need to take a serious look at how we can continue to fulfill the mission that Jesus gave us -- to make disciples of all the nations -- with the resources that we are going to have.  Change is coming: we can either choose to manage the change, or let the change manage us.

    I will let the Diocese -- through the Monitor and their online sites -- discuss the larger progress that has been made during this first year of implementing “Faith In Our Future.”  Allow me to just update you on what we have accomplished this past year in our cohort -- the Catholic Community of Burlington Pike (Cohort 1) -- which is made up of the parishes of Jesus the Good Shepherd, Corpus Christi, and Resurrection.

    All three of the parishes in the cohort are in debt to the Diocese, so this year we thought that it would be important to investigate if we could save money by utilizing an economy of scale.  We established a subcommittee that looked at all the vendors that the parishes use to see if we could use common ones, and possibly negotiate better contracts. This proved to be more complicated than we initially anticipated.  For example, we thought we might be able to contract with one company for snow removal, but will our four campus, and all of us needing the lots cleaned at the same time, we were not able to find a company that could meet our needs.  However, discussion with the business managers of the three parishes suggest that we might be able to find savings in ordering office and maintenance supplies. We are turning the matter over to the business managers to work out the details.

    The other goal we set for ourselves was in the area of youth ministry.  Neither Resurrection nor Corpus Christi had a youth ministry program, but Jesus the Good Shepherd did.  The three parishes appointed representatives to the Youth Ministry Subcommittee (Dennis Taylor is ours), and we started expanding the program at Jesus the Good Shepherd to the other parishes; essentially starting to transform it from a parish program to a cohort program.  The youth group meets the second Saturday of the month. There are about 20 youths from Jesus the Good Shepherd and five from Resurrection involved. While most events this past year were held at Jesus the Good Shepherd, we did host a sports night in our parish center in February.  For the coming year we are going to continue to strengthen the ties between the three parishes, and make connections with the students in Holy Cross Preparatory Academy and Pope John Paul II Regional School.

    For Year 2 of the implementation, our cohort will be focusing on evangelizing families with young and school age children.  We are looking for volunteers to serve on this subcommittee, which will start with listening sessions (and surveys) to discover what are the biggest concerns and desires of this demographic group.  Then we will look at what other parishes in the diocese and in the USA are doing to minister to these concerns. Finally they will submit a plan to implement one or two programs.

    We will also be looking to better collaborate in the area of sacred music.  This might be “choir exchanges,” seasonal cohort concerts, and developing a list of musicians and cantors available for funerals and weddings.

    This is important work, and we are always interested in people who are willing to help by serving on the subcommittees.