Tragedy in Minneapolis
I began the day on Wednesday energized and excited because students were finally back at Assumption Catholic School. I love our school! I love it because it is a highly effective means for preaching the Gospel to and strengthening the faith of Catholic and non-Catholic children alike. I love it because it is a unifying point of Catholic community in Whatcom County. I love it because it is full of lovely students and lovely families and lovely faculty and staff.
So you can imagine how horrified I was, along with every other Catholic school Pastor, Principal, teacher, parent, student, supporter, and person of goodwill, at the school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. School shootings are terrible events in every case, so the context of this one does not make it worse. But it does hit so much closer to home when it happens in a Catholic school, an environment that so many of us live and breathe every day. We do not yet have verified information about the motive of this shooting, but I know many of us are also worried that this could be specifically targeted at Catholics, possibly for the things that we believe or the principles we stand for, and I know that also deepens the worry.
On the practical side of things, I want to reassure everyone that our school and our parishes take safety very seriously. We have been working hard to guarantee that each of our churches has a functional safety ministry for our weekend Masses, and a few of the Assumption safety ministers come to the school Mass regularly. In addition, (Former) Sheriff Bill Elfo joined our School Commission last year, partially to advise us on safety issues related to the school. And this is on top of normal school safety policies, like keeping the gates to the campus and doors to the school locked during the day and keeping the church doors locked after school Mass begins. (The Minneapolis shooter was outside of the building, so some of these methods would not have helped – but Assumption is a tank of a church and what happened in Minneapolis could not physically happen in our building.)
On the spiritual side of things, I would encourage all of us to avoid politicizing this tragedy. There is always the temptation to make this primarily about gun control or mental health care or whatever political movement the shooter identified with. The fact of the matter is that we live in a world of evil, both moral and physical, and it is impossible to legislate evil away or remove it by any means except Jesus. Our job is to pray for the families and community affected, that they would know the presence and love of Jesus in this tragedy. To pray for all Catholic schools, that they would trust in Jesus’ love and presence. And then to love our own families and Catholic community as much as possible every day, because we never know the number of our days with them.
The Lord did not promise to protect us from suffering. But he did promise that he would always, always be with us when we suffer.
New Online Schedule
We have now changed our online Mass schedule from the PDF we had been using last year to a system that is integrated into our website. You can find it at https://www.whatcomcatholic.org/mass. There are also pages for each church and that sort by priest.
Why a change? The main reason is that our old system required Liliana Marshall, our priest scheduler, to update too many documents, causing things to fall through the cracks. Under the previous system, she had to add/subtract Masses from the PDF document and from each priest’s individual Outlook calendar. Under the new system, she can update one program and it automatically shows up in our Outlook calendars and on the website.
.ics Feeds – The technical explanation is that our internal database and calendaring program (ParishStaq) creates .ics feeds for various campus, group, and resource calendars. We created a regional campus and gave each church campus is its own liturgy “Group” – hence the church calendars – and priests are assigned to events as “Resources” – hence the individual priest calendars. The genius of this setup in ParishStaq is that if we have to change which priest is at which liturgy, we can just reassign resources, rather than have to create the event anew in a separate group.
Website Display – A friend of mine, Fr. Jacob Maurer, pioneered this system for his own parishes using Outlook-based .ics feeds. Unfortunately, he uses a WordPress plug-in, which does not work for us because our website is hosted on Squarespace (and I am unwilling to move us to WordPress). We need an iFrame or other embeded solution. And those are surprisingly hard to find.
I found two programs that can work for our purposes: EventCalendarApp, which runs $200/month for the number of calendars we want, and Open Web Calendar, which is free. I went with the free option.
Sadly, you do get what you pay for, and there are some display issues with Open Web Calendar. If a screen is too narrow, for example, it struggles to wrap text and a lot of information gets confused or lost. This is especially problematic when we are trying to make our website look good on both computer screens and phones. As such, I have been forced to default most calendar displays to “Day” view, which looks a little silly. But please click into the “Agenda” view, too, which provides a display that works better for many people with larger screens.
If we have techy-types out there who can find a better solution, PLEASE let me know. The requirement is that it can take an .ics feed and display it in an iFrame. Beyond that, I’m willing to try anything.
Individual Feeds – If you would like to subscribe to our different .ics feeds, here are the URLs:
- Whole County: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/churchwide_calendar.ics?campus_id=167
- Assumption: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7885&tk=bf3a0d4b254692b2691f4e581690524b
- Sacred Heart: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7886&tk=c23b547253a58fa61615f28688c0f992
- Ferndale: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7881&tk=fef45c55d4f706641c3b17ac55917593
- Blaine: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7882&tk=7eaaa3a644334b530cd9243e590c88c1
- Lummi: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7880&tk=9533f21c8eab21d5d6cb58eb555e5652
- Lynden: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7884&tk=d0ad1512f1a4a5998b7b84d5ae0e6260
- Deming: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/group_calendar.ics?id=7883&tk=dfa73c308f4aa0184fd96452a54bd099
- Fr. Moore: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/resource_calendar.ics?id=1728
- Fr. Tyler: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/resource_calendar.ics?id=1731
- Fr. Stephan: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/resource_calendar.ics?id=1729
- Fr. Gerardo: webcal://archseattle.ccbchurch.com/resource_calendar.ics?id=1730
Fr. Moore 
Hello Fr. Moore.. I am VERY concerned that St Anne’s does not have the security measures in place for another homeless man coming into Mass.
The last incident you were the Pastor and this man was able to sit one person away from me and still shout gibberish! I saw him walking down the sidewalk shouting to “no one” outside as I went into Mass. The person who was the greeter told me later that the man was already in the Church sitting in the back when he arrived BEFORE Mass.. he did not tell him to leave. He man came back and calming walked down the aisle during your Homily.. why wasn’t he stopped at the door???? Sadly, mental illness is real and there needs to be better protection/prevention for us at St Anne’s!
Anne Freeman
Anne – there is a difference between uncomfortable and dangerous. The mentally ill are as welcome in our churches as anyone. Our security ministry is not trained to stop mentally ill people at the door and bar them entry. They are trained to keep a close eye on such persons, to make sure they do not pose a threat to anyone’s safety.
I was keeping an eye on that guy throughout Mass, too. He was slightly disruptive, but did not appear dangerous.
Good Morning Father.. true that all are welcome in our Church. However; his sudden appearance and outbursts were very uncomfortable for some folks. I was one person away and I wasn’t sure what he would do since I had seen him on the sidewalk. Got to remember…us “old folks” scare easier that your “youngsters”;-)
Have a wonderful day..Anne