Pastor’s Letter: June 11, 2020

Pastor’s Letter: June 11, 2020

12 Jun 2020 | Posted by: chadmin

Dear friend,

It is a true blessing to have parishioners back in church for Mass. For those who have been present for Mass, thank you for the attention and care with following the system we established. The numbering of pews, the direction of foot traffic, and the use of hand sanitizer all are means for us to ease into our communal celebration of the liturgy. Many people have commented on the ease of the process and offered thanks for the safety protocols in place. I’ve noticed the truth that we are all in a bit of a different situation with concern about the contagion of the coronavirus, our individual risk, or the risk we might pose to others. For this reason, it is important that we all maintain a similar process to allow those who are more or less concerned to all feel comfortable coming to “our” church. As with all things Christian, we live and act for the good of others.

Supply and demand guides so much in our culture. The demand to attend Sunday Mass is much higher than daily Mass.  At this point, we have stopped requiring the use of Eventbrite for daily Mass attendance. With our 25% capacity for any one Mass, we have plenty of space for those who choose to attend the 7 or 8am Mass, Monday through Friday or the 8am Saturday morning. Feel free to join us for Mass, just continue to follow the directives for traffic flow in church and maintaining the appropriate social distancing. For the Sunday Masses, we will continue to use Eventbrite until the day we are back to full capacity in church. While we’ve had a few glitches, Rhonda has successfully implemented the process of scheduling and helped parishioners troubleshoot any questions or concerns. Continue to communicate with the Parish Office any hiccups you have with the process of scheduling attendance at Sunday Mass.

Because our demand for Sunday Mass attendance is higher than we can currently accommodate, we will continue to use Eventbrite to schedule families for individual pews. Realizing that not everyone can attend each Sunday, we will continue to distribute the Eucharist to cars in the parking lot after the 4:30pm Saturday Mass, as well as after the 9am and 11am Sunday Masses. These three Masses will continue to be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube. You can watch at home or by using our WiFi network in the parking lot, in order to participate in Mass prior to receiving Communion. Please let us know if we can do anything better to accommodate your needs at this time. For information purposes, the last several weeks, I’ve been allowed to distribute Communion to residents at Buehler Home on Wednesdays. For safety reasons, there are still limitations on Communion ministers taking the Eucharist to homebound parishioners and some limitations for other nursing homes.

The separation from family and friends during the coronavirus shutdown has been difficult for all of us. I can’t thank you enough for the support given to me personally and to our church, especially in the way of finances. If you have followed the numbers, the church shutdown did result in a decrease in the rate of dollars collected, but we’ve been blessed to maintain our budget and keep up with our employee salaries and expenses. I know many of you made a specific effort to keep us financially stable. Thank you.

Please stay tuned for further information from the parish by email, text message, and our website, www.stphils.com. Have a great week.

God bless,

Father David