February 27, 2025 – Pastor’s Note

Ash Wednesday Notes

I am sorry for being so delinquent with the Ash Wednesday schedule. A few notes, then the schedule itself.

• Ash Wednesday seems to be our third most attended day of the year, after Easter and Christmas. AND YET, Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation. No one is required to attend Mass that day.

• This puts us in a bind, because priests have permission to celebrate vigils and three Masses during the day on holy days of obligation, but we cannot do vigils and are restricted to two Masses on “normal” days like Ash Wednesday.

• This has made scheduling especially hard, because we have 9 communities (7 churches, Spanish community, Viking Catholic) who all expect Mass, but I only have 8 Masses (2 Masses x 4 priests) that we can offer. Plus, some of our communities are large enough to warrant multiple services.

• To that end, I have made use of WORD & ASHES services. These consist of a Liturgy of the Word, plus ashes, without the full Mass. Because there is no obligation to attend Mass on Ash Wednesday, these are perfectly valid ways to commemorate the day. The WORD & ASHES service can technically be presided over by any lay person, but we have chosen to use our deacons strategically to run these.

• I have tried to provide a variety of times in each major region of the county.

• The instructions from the Church are very clear that all ash distribution must occur at least in the context of a Liturgy of the Word. There is absolutely no permission to simply place ashes on someone’s forehead. As such, our churches will not be providing ashes for take-home use (apart from distribution to trained homebound visitors) and our offices will not be placing ashes on people’s heads who drop by.

Ash Wednesday Schedule

• Viking Catholic
  • 5:00 pm – On-Campus – Fr. Tyler
• Bellingham Region
  • 7:30 am – Assumption [WORD AND ASHES] – Deacon Larry
  • 12:30 pm – Assumption (School) – Fr. Tyler
  • 6:00 pm – Sacred Heart – Fr. Stephan
• Ferndale Region
  • 8:00 am – Lummi [WORD AND ASHES] – Deacon Dale
  • 12:30 pm – Blaine – Fr. Stephan
  • 5:00 pm – Ferndale – Fr. Moore
  • 7:00 pm – Ferndale (Spanish) – Fr. Moore
• Lynden/Deming Region
  • 7:30 am – Lynden – Fr. Thumbi
  • 6:00 pm – Deming – Fr. Thumbi

Lenten Fridays

The plan for Lenten Fridays differs from location to location, so pay attention to your local bulletin. However, I feel compelled to give presiding responsibilities over Stations of the Cross to lay people. This is because we are still learning not to be jealous of each other as a Family, and I do not want to set up a situation where one location feels slighted because they are the only place without a priest leading.

Instead, the priests have agreed to hear confessions during Stations whenever they are available. You should generally plan on being able to give a confession during Stations. We will advertise ahead of time which weeks a priest might not be around at a certain location. I, personally, will be jumping between Lynden and Assumption on Fridays, to make sure there are opportunities for Spanish confessions.

Partners in the Gospel Update

I have had a few conversations with parishioners recently in which they expressed that our new reality was beginning to wear on them and they were beginning to despair. In most cases, this despair was primarily due to the worry that our current reality was going to be our forever reality.

So I want to reiterate to everyone that this first year is focused entirely on just getting the county to work as a unit. There are a lot of staff re-orgs and county-wide working group meetings, so that we can begin to feel like a unit. In the pre-Partners world, this arrangement would be have referred to as a cluster of parishes, and the work would have concluded here – with a reasonably united staff and a workable budget.

But because of Partners, the work does not end here. This year is focused on making our current reality workable, but future years will be focused on significantly changing the current reality. We do not know what those changes will look like, so most of the work will be creating frameworks for discussion so that all of us, as a family, can plot a strong and sustainable future together.

Concretely, this means that right now Olivia Phillips and I are working on our Pastoral Councils and a related structure called the Parish Family Advisory Council. These two groups will be doing the heavy lifting of creating frameworks, running listening sessions, and synthesizing data so that everyone has a voice in what the future of the Church in Whatcom County will look like. The summary is that it may look like we have reached a plateau and that nothing much else is going to change, but in reality we are just now finishing the foundational work to have much larger conversations going forward.