As Jesus Christ calls us to constantly renew His Church, we must be prepared to lend our voice and efforts to the possible ways in which we bring about that needed renewal.

Included here is a summary of where we are today, but much more will be shared in our parish meeting on Sunday, September 19 at 12:30pm in Hayes Center – please come to learn more and share your feedback and input.

Process Overview
Renewal requires envisioning, planning, and new means to bring Jesus Christ to others.
More than 100 groupings of parishes and schools across the Archdiocese are engaging in a process to address necessary questions of structure, how to work together across communities within each grouping, and to establish a strong foundation for vitality through focused evangelization and faith formation efforts. Supporting our parishes with the best structures enables us to breathe renewed life into our efforts to make disciples, build communities, and inspire witness.

Initial Scenarios
To initiate discussion, the pastors of our grouping parishes and a team at the Archdiocese Pastoral Center have offered a set of initial scenarios that show potential models of how our parishes and schools could be configured in the future. These initial scenarios, which will be shared in detail at our next parish meeting, are conversation starters only. No decisions have been made. These scenarios reflect our grouping’s local realities using a set of criteria determined using data across the archdiocese to evaluate how a structure would support vitality and ensure viability, such as:
• Ministerial and spiritual needs of the parish: To enliven the work of evangelization, formation, worship, and pastoral care in today’s time and culture, parishes ordinarily will build a strong a staff team to support the pastor. Staff teams will be professionally trained and justly paid. To support this staffing and basic operations, such as
paying utilities, parishes generally will need operating revenue of $750,000 or more (excluding rental income).
• Parishioner count and Mass attendance: Based on the number of pastors expected to be available across the Archdiocese in the future, a minimum of 800 parishioners attending weekend Mass is needed to be assigned a full-time, resident pastor.
• Balanced workloads for priests: It is critical that our pastors are supported with the resources and teams to support sacramental life, pastoral care, and parish administration.
• Parish financial stability and facilities: Parish financial stability and adequate, accessible and safe facilities with capacity for growth and ongoing repair/maintenance.

The initial scenarios for our grouping, which consists of St. Monica, St. Rosalie, St. Eugene, Divine Savior and Our Lady, Mother of the Church parishes will be presented at our parish meeting. There are initial scenarios for how the parishes could be organized differently from today – possibilities to bring together resources and leadership to enable new methods for carrying out our mission in the grouping. The scenarios refer to a combined canonical parish: a model in which two or more current parishes become one parish – with one pastor, budget, staff, Finance Council, etc. – but that can have multiple active churches.