June 21, 2020
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
The building of our new Early Childhood Education and Youth Center is going as planned. It is really exciting to see the progress that has been made. There have also been a lot of improvement projects that have been happening on the Mary Our Queen Campus. This week we began the installation of the new windows in our school. We are able to install new windows thanks to the funds that were raised from our MARQUEE in 2018. We are grateful for your generosity that made this possible.
Because of the hail damage that we experienced last year, we have been working with our insurance company on addressing what needs to be repaired and replaced on our campus. We will be replacing all the shingles of the roofs of the rectory, the Kenny Center and the Church that had been damaged by the hailstorm this summer. We also received money to repair the air conditioning units of our school.
In the beginning of the year we had contracted an engineering company to evaluate the mechanical heating and cooling systems on our campus and to make recommendations on the course of action that we will have to undertake. Given that the air conditioning units are over 20 years old and in light of our future needs and after consulting with our Building and Maintenance Committee, we have made the decision to replace the air conditioning units of our school with new units. We will also need to address the heating of our school given that all the pipes are 50 years old within the next few years. The installation of the new air conditioning units is part of the campus plan to address the needs of our Parish. We are using funds that were set aside for the future needs of our School to pay for these units.
Over the next few weeks, I will address the updates and needs of our Parish facilities. We are doing the best we can in light of the limitations of the budget cuts that we had to make because of the coronavirus pandemic that impacted our Parish. I would like to continue to express my gratitude to all who continue to support our Parish. Your support continues to help us meet our financial obligations, especially the salaries of our teachers and staff of our parish. Our Parish is dependent on our Sunday Collections that pay for the running of our Parish (Tuition for our school covers about 50% of our school budget. Our Sunday collections make up the difference). We are concluding our financial year at the end of June. We are about 17% less in collections this fiscal year or about $315,000 under budget. Thankfully, the PPP loan helped us meet our commitments for this financial year. We are praying and doing our best to work things out. Once again, thank you to all who continue to support our Parish.
We have two Parishes that have been impacted by the coronavirus and as a result, St Margaret Mary and St Stephen the Martyr had to temporarily shut their doors. Once again, this is perhaps every priest’s nightmare. I am not so much afraid of getting the virus but rather I am afraid of getting it and spreading it to those around me. Once again, we continue to encourage everyone to follow the guidelines as indicated by our local authorities. For those using masks in Church and continuing to follow the social distancing guidelines, we would like to thank you for doing so. We are also working on a policy to allow our Church to be opened up for groups to meet beginning in July in light of the guidelines that are requested of us from our local authorities.
Last week, we resumed the 6:20am weekday Masses in addition with our 8:15am Masses that we offer each day from Monday to Friday. We also resumed our 8:15am Mass on Saturday. Please note that we have moved our online weekday Mass from Monday to Saturday to 8:15am. Our weekend Masses on Saturday evening is at 5:30pm and Masses on Sunday are at 7am, 9am and 11am. Our online Mass on Sunday is at 9am. For all who attended Mass last week, thank you for working with us and maintaining your social distance. We will continue to fine tune our procedures and provide more details on how everyone is to be seated via email, on our Website and Facebook account.
We continue to send you 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.
We continue to pray for all those affected by the coronavirus especially – those in the medical profession, those who have lost their jobs, those whose pay checks have been affected by the public event limits, the businesses impacted by the virus and the love ones we can’t visit because of the social distancing that is requested from us.
God’s Blessings,
Fr Marc