Pastor’s Corner — June 27th, 2021
We Crushed Our DSA Goal
A big thank you for all of you who responded in thanksgiving and gave to our DSA goal. Our goal was $180,172 and we raised $284,407 with 775 families giving. Half of the $104,235 comes right back to the parish. May God be praised for your generous support of the solid pastoral mission of our Diocese.
Goodbye, Father Joe
These words were hard for me to type. I knew Fr. Joe for three years while I was on faculty at Sacred Heart Major Seminary when he was a seminary student. Then after he was ordained a priest we both left for St. Pat’s together. Now four years later, he’s moving on to to serve our Christian brothers and sisters in Lansing. Not only has he grown so much as a priest, he’s affected so many of our lives in the process.
I’ll miss him for many reasons: he was true joy to work with in parish ministry, he was truly effective in so many ways in bringing Christ to the parish and the parish to Christ, he is a joyful priest who is serious about holiness, he and I shared and remarkably similar vision for pastoral renewal in the Church (I don’t remember any real disagreement on matters of parish renewal). But I’ll miss him most for the ways in which we both grew together as priests and as close friends. We spent a lot of time together praying, laughing and hashing things out for the sake of the parish. In fact, our bantering and joking back and forth at Mass was the evidence of our true friendship in the Lord. I know I’m not going to be the only one to miss him.
I know I’ll see Fr. Joe around the diocese, especially if he ends up joining the priest renewal fraternity that my priest friends and I are planning to expand. But I know that for many of you, it might be a long while if ever you see him again. The unwritten tradition in our diocese is that a priest who leaves an assignment will not come back to the parish for at least a year until after he leaves. This is for two reasons.
First, it helps the parish actually say goodbye to him. It takes a while for people to grieve the loss of a priest and a while for the priest to grieve the loss of people he’s served. In my experience being moved is the hardest part about being a priest. Second, it gives the new priest (in this case Fr. Miguel) a chance to get to know people and get established here at St. Pat’s. If Fr. Joe was always around, that couldn’t happen. A clean break is needed.
Now I know this parish is used to associate priests being moved every 2-4 years. But we shouldn’t allow that to minimize the impact Fr. Joe has had on us or the feelings of sadness we might be experiencing for some time. God was faithful to us in giving us Fr. Joe. God is also faithful to us in giving us Fr. Miguel. May the Lord continue the beautiful work here at St. Pat’s for many years to come as he blesses Fr. Joe in his next assignment. Fr. Joe’s last day is Wednesday.
Your servant in the Lord,
Fr. Mathias