Confession Services
Right before my week of vacation, we held our first First Friday confession service in Lynden. I, and the other priests, found it was a great success. Very helpful to have multiple priests, and we had enough confessions to last us the entire hour.
It is my plan that these will replace the Advent and Lent confession services that had previously been offered in the North County churches. I, and many priests of the Archdiocese, have been moving away from Advent and Lent services because in our experience it trains people to only confess during those seasons, rather than to be spiritually aware of when they need confession. So if you normally only confess during Advent and Lent, please keep an eye out for our First Friday rotating services.
Our next one is actually on a second Friday, Nov. 08, at Assumption at 4:30 pm.
Staff Re-Org
I am still desperately trying to carve out office time to create the actual org-chart and visuals for a post to WhatcomCatholic.org, but our administrative staff re-org takes effect this week. Very little will change from a parishioner perspective (most of it is behind-the-scenes job description changes and org-chart changes), but there are some things you need to know.
The summary is that everything has been reorganized into single points of contact. Your contacts are:
- Finances – Elizabeth Ames (elizabeth@whatcomcatholic.org)
- Facilities – Bert Bertschinger (bert@whatcomcatholic.org)
- Priest Scheduling – Liliana Marshall (priests@whatcomcatholic.org)
- Assumption – Michael Rombaoa (michaelr@assumption.org)
- Sacred Heart – Ellie Spring (reception@shbham.org)
- St. Joseph’s (Ferndale) – Myra Whiting (myra@stjosephferndale.org)
- St. Joseph’s (Lynden) – Lorena Duarte (lorena@stjoseph-stpeter.org)
- St. Joachim’s – Lucetta Pena (lucettaT@lummi-nsn.gov)
- St. Anne’s – Terry Aiello (tjaiello@comcast.net)
- St. Peter’s – Valerie Cronk (cronkkevin@hotmail.com)
Finances, Facilities, and Priest Scheduling are all regional positions funded by all of our churches equally. The contacts at Assumption, Sacred Heart, Ferndale, and Lynden are all employees with the job title of “Location Manager” and they are responsible for everything except Faith Formation (and sometimes Liturgy) on their campuses. The contacts at St. Joachim’s, St. Anne’s, and St. Peter’s are all volunteers with the title of “Church Coordinator”; even though they are volunteers, I wanted to give them official titles so that it is clear that they are my primary contacts at each community and they generally act on my behalf.
Note that: (1) I have not reorganized Fatih Formation, so that still varies depending on the church; (2) I have moved Lorena Duarte to Lynden from Ferndale, (3) I have allowed Kim Walker to focus entirely on Faith Formation again at Sacred Heart, and Ellie Spring is now responsible for the office management; (4) and I have two additional regional positions, HR (Michael Rombaoa) and Operations (Olivia Phillips), but there will not be much need for parishioners to contact them.
[N.B. The print edition also includes a biography of Fr. Stephan.]
Fr. Moore 