Scheduling with Priests
One of the hardest parts of this Partners in the Gospel transition for myself, and likely for our parishioners, has been the amount of discipline I have to have in saying “no”. As a priest, my heart is with our people – when someone is excited or hurting or growing in prayer or doubting a teaching, I want to be with them and walk with them. But the principle I have had to remind myself of over and over and over again is “Do not do something that someone else is capable of doing.” In order to do the things that only I, as the Pastor, can do (which is all the top-level administrative work), I need to allow others to do the work they are perfectly capable of doing.
To that end, can I encourage you to meet with Fr. Thumbi and Fr. Stephan? One of the massive benefits of Partners is that we now have Parochial Vicars! Where previously parishioners needed to be very careful with a priest’s time, because they were all pastors and needed lots of time to make sure their administrative tasks got done, that is far less true today. Please, if you want to meet with a priest, just ask. They have designated office hours at different locations around the county (you can find these on the Priest Schedule on https://whatcomcatholic.org), specifically so that priests are regularly available to our parishioners.
Things are on track to have an Executive Assistant for Clergy in place in the beginning of September, and once that happens you would just e-mail that person to set up a meeting with a priest. But until that happens, e-mail your local parish office and they will arrange something for you.
Mass Intentions
We are trying to standardize Mass intention practices across the county. This article is an excellent explainer on what a Mass intention is, but a brief explainer here: Every baptized person attending Mass can and should be offering that Mass for their own personal intentions, as an expression of their baptismal priesthood. This, of course, includes the priest. However, a practice grew up in the early monastic period of paying priests to offer their daily Masses, not for the priest’s own intentions, but for specific paid intentions. After all, the priests were celebrating Mass every day while the person paying may only be at Mass once a week, so the number of Masses offered would multiply. Over time, in some parts of the world, this became the priests’ primary source of daily income, and is thus highly regulated by canon law.
In the United States, priests are paid differently, but we still retain the practice of offering our Masses for the specific intentions of people who are donating for the support of the Church and the priests.
Specific to Whatcom County, I want to make sure we are all on the same page on some items.
- A paid Mass intention is different than the Prayers of the Faithful. The Prayers of the Faithful, in a sense, are a preparation to give people a list of intentions they might offer up on the altar during the rest of the Mass. The paid intention, however, is the primary person the priest is praying for as he prays the Eucharistic Prayer (in addition to all the general petitions for the people and Church included in the prayer itself).
- Paid Mass intentions should be for a specific person (either living or dead), not causes or groups.
- Each Mass will only have one paid intention, though that donor might include two or three people in that one intention (for example, a couple on their anniversary, or deceased parents remembered together). (There is permission to combine intentions from multiple donors, but we are not going to take that option in Whatcom County.)
- For now, each Parish Office will determine for itself how it will schedule intentions. Right now, most of our parishes allow people to schedule their intentions on specific days. But the older practice (still retained, for example, by our Cathedral in Seattle), is simply to offer intentions on a “first in, first out” basis (i.e., keep of list of intentions, and just assign the oldest one to the Mass each day). If we begin to receive too many intentions, or if scheduling specific days becomes too chaotic with all the Partners changes, we have the option to return to the older practice.
Fr. Moore 