St Mary's Spotlight: financial difficulty

Courier Post comments

Here are a few comments on a recent letter to the editor lamenting the pain that Catholic parishes are now enduring. The person who emailed us the link to these comments said this:

Please check out Charlie 164's post. He is saying that even parish core teams are realizing that the bishop's reconfiguration plan will financially hurt the parishes and Catholic schools. Remember, core team members had to take an assessment to prove that they were open minded about the bishop's plans before they could be designated core team members.

Geraldine:
just wait til the churches come down and the wawas go up
8/10/2009 9:47:13 AM

Charlie164:
Rita you are correct about one thing and that is that no one at the diocese really cares about anyone or anything except their ill conceived plan. They don't care a single darn about parishioners or even their own pastors. They have put pastors in an almost untenable situation and are totally ignoring any core team members who are pointing out problems with the decisioin. Through their publicity man Walton they will paint a different picture but believe me, most of what he publishes is far from the truth. The real tragedy is that the plan is, in many cases, not going to work financially. They have not solved the basic problem of funding for schools and the parishes will continue to have financial difficulty because of that. Then, how will they afford all the new positions to create "vibrancy"? Then where will we be? A colossal upheaval for a failed plan. Unbelievable.
8/10/2009 4:52:00 PM

KH216:
Rita,
My heart and thoughts go out to you and your neighbors because you have recently lost your beloved church, St. John Neumann Church. There was no valid reason to close it because even using the Bishop's own population study, the Catholic population in southern Camden County and Gloucester County is growing, not declining. I also don't think the Bishop and his associates are precisely explaining anything about these mergers and the faithful are not at all happy with it. Also, there is a solution to the priest solution here. I have heard that three different orders of priests offered their services for the Diocese of Camden, but Bishop Galante turned them down.
8/12/2009 3:48:12 PM

"Vibrancy," as Bishop Galante defines it (a large number of paid professional lay ministers in each parish), apparently comes at a price that is simply too high to be sustained.  You may remember when Bishop Galante referred to St. John the Evangelist Church in Naples, Florida as a model for the parish vibrancy he seeks here in the Diocese of Camden.

Quoting from the Philadelphia Inquirer article, which is quoting Bishop Galante:

And all he [Bishop Galante's brother] talks about is how vibrant the local parish is: the people going to Mass, the wonderful preaching, concerts with sacred music and popular music.

The vitality and community his brother has found in Florida are what he hopes South Jersey Catholics will one day encounter in the 66 parishes that will remain.

Now, Naples is a very wealthy area.  Half of the American Fortune 500 CEOs live in Naples, FL.  And this is a huge parish, with 5,200 registered families as of last October (before a downward revision to 3,200 families by removing inactive parishioners).  And yet this vibrant parish, whose bulletin that reads like a magazine so impressed Bishop Galante, is finding this level of paid, professional lay ministry unsustainable.

St. John the Evangelist had a whopping $229,000 deficit for Quarter 1 of this past year (07/01/08 - 09/30/08).  Click here for link to bulletin with minutes for the Pastoral Council Quarterly Board Meeting.  Their March 8, 2009 bulletin showed a year-to-date income of more than $1,175,000 (in just over 9 months), but it also revealed that this was insufficient to support their paid staff: 

Consequently, four administrative support positions have been reduced into two.  We have also had to let go of one full time and two part time members of our maintenance staff.

We are sorry for those who lost their positions, especially in the difficult economy we are facing, but there is an important lesson in this.  Most of our new "mega-parishes" will be less than half the size of this church and our parishioners are certainly much less affluent, on the whole, than those from Naples, FL.  So, if St. John the Evangelist, with all its size and wealth, cannot afford the "vibrancy" desired by Bishop Galante, how can we, especially with all of the ill-will created by these mergers?

As a side note, we are glad to hear that the local bishop has requested St. John the Evangelist church install kneelers. ("[A]t St. John's we stand in joy rather than kneel in fear.")  We are also pleased to hear that they are no longer allowing VOTF to have their annual Mass at St. John the Evangelist.  Now, if they only move their tabernacle from its current location ("in the back of the church on the left side") to front and center and fix a few other problems related to their "understanding" of the Real Presence, they might be OK, despite their financial crisis!

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Why Save St. Mary's?

What's true for OL Queen of Peace, Pitman & Assumption, Wildwood Crest is also true for St. Mary's Malaga:

"The people in Pitman bought that ground and built that church and it belongs to them. You can't just take it away."

-Anthony Mecca, Queen of Peace Parish, Pitman (also on the slate for closure), May 8, 2008

"This is God's house. Let us live here with God as we've done all these years."

-Fred Spiewak, Assumption Parish, Wildwood Crest, June 11, 2008

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