June 13, 2021

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I will be leading a Pilgrimage to Italy from November 8 to 18, 2021. The Pilgrimage includes visits to Venice, Padua, Florence, Assisi and Rome.  The cost for the Pilgrimage is $3279 per person (based on 2 persons sharing in twin-bedded rooms with private bath).  A detail brochure is available in the Parish Office and in the Church.  If you have any questions, kindly contact me at the Parish Office.

There was an incident involving one of the glass panels in our new Early Childhood Education and Youth Center.  It involved a BB gun that  appears to have been fired from a car as they drove by the building on 120th Street.  A glass panel was shattered as a result.  A police report was filed and we have contacted our insurance company.  Please pray for all those affected by vandalism especially our Churches.

Last week, our Parish sponsored a training formation session for teachers that will be involved for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.  The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is a Montessori based Religious Education that was implemented at our Preschool at the beginning of last academic year.  It has provided a wonderful experience for our students, and we are hoping to provide this opportunity for our Religious Education Program in the near future. If you are interested in being a teacher for this program, details are available in this week’s bulletin.

There has been a lot of questions regarding who our new Associate Pastor will be given the new Priest assignments that have been released by the Archdiocese.   We will be announcing who our new Associate Pastor after this weekend so please stay tuned to our Parish Website or Facebook page.

I am grateful for all the many volunteers who have helped make our campus grounds look beautiful.  Last year we started putting more mulch around our campus especially the areas where we are not able to grow any grass and filled areas with landscape rocks.  We have volunteers plant new plants on our planters and have planted 9 new trees around and various new plants around our campus.  We will be reseeding areas of our campus with new grass in the near future.  With all this said, I am looking for a volunteer or several volunteers to head or assist in our Parish Landscape Committee to help make our campus grounds more beautiful.  If this is something you are able to help, kindly contact me at the Parish Office.

As our Church slowly reopens up, we had the ropes removed for half our Church with no social distancing required.  We have the other half of the Church available for those still wanting to social distance. Please note that masks are required for the social distancing section. We are requesting that mask be used when coming forward to receive Communion.  Thank you for kindly working with us.  We will reevaluate these protocols on a week to week basis.

Please note that our Church is open for meetings and groups.  As a reminder, please monitor COVID-19 symptoms.  As always, if you or a family member has a fever, chills, body aches, headache, sore throat, cough, and loss of taste and smell, they should stay home from school or church until symptom free.   We continue to place the health and safety of all members of our school and parish community our top priority.

Please check out our Weekly Updates via email.  If you have not received an email, kindly call our Parish Office and we will add you in our email mailing list.  Thank you again for supporting us during this time. We continue to keep all those affected by this virus in our prayers.

God’s Blessings,

Fr Marc