St. Kateri Thank You
A huge thank you to everyone who helped with and attended the St. Kateri celebration at St. Joachim on Monday. It was a lively event, with somewhere between 300 and 350 people at Mass and the subsequent potluck. It is my hope that we can continue to have large, county-wide events like this at our different churches throughout the year.
Mass Times Town Halls
My “Town Halls” on Mass times continue this weekend with Ferndale, Blaine, and Lummi and next weekend with Lynden and Deming. If you need a reminder about what we are discussing, you can find it at https://www.whatcomcatholic.org/updates/2025/7/9/decision-83-sunday-mass-alternative-2. It was good to speak with parishioners at the two Bellingham churches these last two weekends. Those two conversations did not result in any significant re-thinking of the plan, so I am interested to see what comes out of the next two weekends.
I was asked at Sacred Heart about the timeline for all of this. My answer was that I have a pretty good sense, in collaborative processes, about when we have stopped making forward progress. At some point in a discussion, everything on the field is revealed – we know what tensions we are choosing between and what our different options are, and at that point a decision just needs to be made. We have had a few re-thinks to-date, so we have been making forward progress up until now. And I want to leave open the possibility that the same thing could happen again in North/East county. However, I also get the sense that we are nearing the point where we have made the best proposals we can, and a decision just has to be made. Depending on what happens this weekend and next weekend, my hope is that we can make an official announcement before the Feast of the Assumption (Aug. 15) and implement these changes before the first weekend of September. That said, again, I need to give North / East county their due, so I cannot make any timeline official until I see how the conversation goes there.
Wedding Season
We are squarely in wedding season here in Whatcom County. If I recall correctly, we have two weddings this weekend (both couples are bringing in visiting priests, and may the Lord bless them for it!) and one next weekend, and my guess is that this will continue for the rest of the summer.
Weddings are a lot of work, even for the priests, so it can be hard on our schedules to have so many weddings during a small period of time. However, I am so thankful for every couple today that gets married in the Church. A church wedding is now a cultural outlier – most people do not plan on it or want to do the work to make it happen. Every couple that gets married in a church today is making a very strong statement about God, faith, and family, and we need those statements desperately. I hope if you get invited to a wedding this summer, you will spend some time thanking God that He is still calling young people to make firm, life-long commitments, rather than having them settle for the no-firm-commitments cohabitation that many Millennials and Gen Z-ers have fallen into.
Fr. Moore 