New Stations of the Cross Booklets
I have been wanting new Stations of the Cross booklets for a few years now. The books we have used my previous years here was a partial presentation of the Scriptural Stations, but with parts missing and some custom material added. It was also only bilingual in that it switched between English and Spanish, but it did not print everything in English and Spanish.
This year, through the Herculean efforts of Brenda Dunford, we now have a side-by-side presentation – in full – of the Scriptural Stations. This will enrich the Scripture and liturgical sources we use to pray over each station and will allow us to change the number of stations we do in English or Spanish, depending on the proportion of people in attendance. I am very excited to use these Stations this year!
Financial Correction
In the bulletin last week, I published a financial update saying that our parish was now on track to avoid a deficit because of especially healthy end-of-year giving. It turns out that is sort of true. This week, Michael Rombaoa (our parish Administrator) reminded me that $50,000 of the $80,000 we received in the last week of the year was the bequest I wrote about in the bulletin on January 12. Having removed that from our calculations, here are the actual numbers as of this week:
YTD Giving (FY24): $696,108 YTD Budgeted Giving (FY24): $715,166
YTD Giving (FY23): $679,988
What does this mean? Well, because of the bequest, it is true that we will likely not have an overall deficit this year. However, relying on extraordinary income to pay for ordinary expenses is really shoddy budgeting practices (see my letter on that here). So we are on track to have an ordinary income deficit and we still need to focus on moving all of our parishioners to percentage-based giving, so that we can stay apace with inflation. If our ordinary income does not increase with inflation each year, then each year we will fall behind.
Fr. Moore 