Listen to this note instead: https://morefrmoore.podbean.com/e/july-15-2026-pastors-note/
St. Kateri Mass
Thank you to everyone who made our St. Kateri celebration at Lummi such a success, especially our St. Joachim, St. Joseph, and St. Anne volunteers. We estimate that we had nearly 500 people at the Mass and potluck to celebrate our Native American saint at our Native American church.
Steubenville Northwest
Last week, I travelled to Spokane with 32 of our youth and 7 chaperones for the annual Steubenville Northwest youth conference. These are amazing events, with 1000+ youth from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Canada and beyond, worshipping together and engaging with high-impact speakers and praise music. Thank you to all of our “stockholders” (youth fundraising donors) who made this possible.
As the Pastor, I value going to Steubenville NW because I am able to connect with the next generation of parish youth, get to know them individually, and hear about their lives and joys and struggles. But as a priest, I go for the confessions. I and the other priests in attendance each heard upward of 8 hours of confession each over the course of the weekend, and we were all marveling at just how powerfully the Lord showed up.
I should say, the Lord always shows up in confession – our faith guarantees that his merciful redemption is present through the contrition of the penitent and the words of the priest. In addition, I am subjectively most aware of the presence of the Lord through confessions – I consistently feel him guiding my words and inspiring my heart as I help penitents work through their sins.
(Side note – I am always sad when parishioners do not want to confess to me because they know me – nowhere do I feel more intimately connected to my parishioners, nowhere do I feel more deeply my identity as priest and Pastor, than in the confessional.)
Well, take that dynamic and multiply it by the teenager factor and you get some of the most impactful confessions I have ever heard as a priest. Teens naturally feel everything deeply, plus the retreat is geared toward producing a high-octane emotional experience of the Lord, plus some of these kids are confronting profound questions about happiness and sin for the first time in their lives. And BAM – open hearts, open minds, changed lives. I was exceedingly blessed by my time there and I hope our youth and chaperones feel similarly.
Communion Patens
In the coming months (as I can find time to train altar servers and priests), we are going to start introducing communion patens at some of our churches. Sacred Heart and Assumption first, and then we will see from there.
A communion paten is a metal plate on a long handle held under the communicant’s mouth or hands by the server as the communicant receives the host. These were used for centuries to prevent hosts from dropping to the floor if the priest missed someone’s mouth or some other mistake was made.
I am honestly not that worried about dropping hosts. It does happen, and any rescued host is a win, but that is not why I am rolling this out. Instead, I am exceedingly worried about people walking away with hosts. At Assumption, after finding a host in the bathroom a few years ago, we started having our ushers watch every person in the communion line at the weekend Masses; and yet we have STILL recently found hosts in the pews. Hosts walking away is a huge and deeply scandalous problem, and I feel the burden of doing everything I possibly can to keep this from happening. I have reminded people many times to receive the host before walking away, and yet so many still start walking before placing the host in their mouth.
Well, Fr. Tyler has been pioneering the communion paten at the 5:00 pm Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart, and we have found that it significantly increases the discipline of receiving the host before taking any step away from the minister. Having seen the results myself, I think it is our best chance of diminishing (hopefully to zero) the number of hosts that walk away and are never received.
We do need to purchase patens for many of our churches, so if you are interested in sponsoring a paten for your church (I am still pricing them, but assume about $250/paten), please contact your location manager to offer your sponsorship.
Thank you for your patience as we expand this experiment.
Fr. Moore 