September 17, 2025 – Pastor’s Note

High School at Sacred Heart

The Northern Deanery Catholic High School (we promise this is not the permanent name) Steering Committee has requested to use Sacred Heart’s Parish Hall as its temporary location while it gets establishes and looks for a more permanent home. You can read my letter to the Sacred Heart community about hosting a high school here.

Parish Family Listening Sessions

Thanks to a lot of hard work from our PFAC (Parish Family Advisory Commission), we are ramping up to hold our first Partners in the Gospel listening sessions in October. Please make sure you look for a list of dates and times at your location and put them on your calendar NOW. The PFAC would also really appreciate if you could fill out and return one of their RSVP postcards. That will make the sessions themselves go more smoothly.

Now, I want to explain why these are important and to address some skepticism that I have heard.

Importance: There is nothing more important than our salvation through Jesus, and everything the Church does must be animated by a desire to receive and spread that salvation. Partners in the Gospel is an administrative reorganization that aims to make our parish communities more effective at preaching the Gospel, especially in light of diminishing numbers of priests, parishioners, and resources.

The reason these listening sessions are important is because the leaders do not have all the answers. Archbishop Etienne is a pretty astute guy, and I certainly think the world of myself (😜), but our experiences are limited. If we were to make HUGE decisions based only on our own perspectives, those would likely be bad decisions. The larger the decision, the larger the number of people we need to hear from. The listening sessions serve to allow us to hear from the maximal number of people, so that we can make the largest administrative decision to face our Archdiocese since Vatican II.

Skepticism #1: This is an unimportant question. Fair enough. The first question is “Who are we?”, which totally seems like a softball that is not going anywhere. But this is important for two reasons:

1. Answering this question allows us to determine what is not working in our parishes and what is working. When we make concrete decisions later on (“Who do we want to become?” and “How do we get there?”), we do not want to be fixing things that are not broken or abandoning practices that are currently very effective.
2. The first question is intentionally a softball. We want an easy run to work out all the kinks in the system. We do not want to be answering a super contentious question while we are also stumbling over the process. We need people to come to these early sessions so that they become comfortable with how these listening sessions go. Then, in later phases, we can focus more on the question than on the process.

Skepticism #2: Nothing we say is going to matter. Some of this is based on folks’ experiences of the listening sessions leading up to Partners in the Gospel. I have certainly heard about some poorly run processes in that lead up and I am sorry if that was your experience. That said:

1. There is a difference between being heard and getting our way. Just because the result is different than the opinions we expressed does not mean that those opinions were ignored or had no effect.
2. At Assumption, at least, I did find the listening sessions helpful. And the conversations with parishioners afterward, prompted by those sessions, were also helpful. My mind changed a few times in the lead up process, based on the conversations I was having.
3. I served on the Presbyteral Council at the time of the family-ing decisions, which was one of two large committees that made the ultimate recommendations to the Archbishop about the parish families. I can tell you that before every single decision we read aloud the summary sheet coming out of all the affected parishes, and that many decisions were affected (and sometimes changed) based on what those sheets said.
4. Ultimately, no one can control whether I or the Archbishop listen to the parishioners. The two of us will have to answer to Jesus at the end of our lives about whether we acted with integrity, empathy, and openness. But, whether you trust us to listen or not, you can control the quality of information that is given to us. We will be making our decisions based on the perspectives of the people who show up and get recorded. You may not trust me to listen if you show up, but it is impossible for me to listen if you don’t.

Skepticism #3: It is a really silly process. I do not necessarily disagree. I like quick, dynamic conversations with a lot of back-and-forth. The “Listening in the Spirit” format (where everyone speaks, one at a time, for 3 minutes each, and then we go around again, before being able to dialogue) can be frustrating. It is designed for particularly contentious questions, to make sure everyone has a chance to express themselves and to force people to listen to each other. It may not be the best format for the first, easier question, but it will be very helpful for the later questions. And this is our time to practice with it.

That said, I am considering making my Town Halls a permanent, regularly scheduled activity (maybe once every two months at each location). So if you feel like the Listening in the Spirit conversation was not sufficient, there will be an additional place to process, with me directly, what came out of those listening sessions.

Summary: This Partners in the Gospel process, and the 25 to 50-year decisions that come from it, is only as good as our investment in it. The more people engage in these questions, the more I can trust that our final decisions are the best ones possible.