Facing Change 9/12

Coming Together to Celebrate

and to Face a Need for Changes

This Sunday members of St. Mary and St. Martha Parishes are coming together in a cookout social to celebrate a new ministry year, spend social and fun time together, and welcome our newer parishioners into our faith family. When our parish families were still new to working together, I spoke of the collaborative of parishes like our “extended family.” With 15 years of experience together (eleven years as a formal “collaborative”), growing our ministries and evangelization, caring for each other through a pandemic and working our way back to the vibrant parishes we are, I feel like the members of our two parishes are like cousins growing up in the same neighborhood - we think of each other more like siblings. 

This year as we celebrate, we are also beginning to adjust to the new reality of having only one full-time priest in our collaborative. While this will be challenging for all of us, many churches before us have navigated this transition well and remained robust parishes - even growing in their sense of strength and vibrancy with more people worshipping together rather than spread thin across more Masses than we need. Our biggest hurdle in this transition will be adjusting to a new Lord's Day Mass schedule that continues our mission and serves the needs of as many people as possible across both parishes and beyond. 

We need you to understand the rationale behind these changes. Shortage of priests is only part of the reason for reducing the Mass schedule at this time. In fact, our leadership councils have been re-evaluating the need for our current schedule of 7 Masses for some time now. The overall trend of declining numbers of people worshipping in recent decades (both Catholic and other religious communities) resulted in even our largest Masses today typically filling only 30-40% of our respective church capacities (about 250 at St. Martha and 700 at St. Mary), with several Masses only 15-24% full.

As a collaborative of parishes, we have lived well the vision of the Disciples in Mission plan for our archdiocese, restructuring not just for downsizing, but more importantly, for mission and evangelization. We can feel good about fulfilling the priorities and goals of our own PWC pastoral plan, and our parishioners and parish families are stronger for it. This bodes well for our weathering the current challenges and continuing to live the mission of our parishes in Plainville and Wrentham.

Coming back from the pandemic, many parish collaboratives introduced a reduced Mass schedule, but we restored our complete 7 Mass schedule, hoping it would bring comfort and ease people in coming back to church. Our parishes have rebounded rather well and still have new people coming, but like most parishes, our attendance is still lower than it was in the 2010’s. Today, there are many weekends we could fit the entire PWC attendance into 2 Masses: one at each church. Rest assured that no one is suggesting we do that, but our collaborative clearly does not need more than 4 total Masses to accommodate our attendance - now and in the foreseeable future.

These changes will also put less stress on our volunteers, the pastoral team (clergy & staff), and other lay ministers. If we dedicate ourselves to walking this journey together to keep our parishes strong, the changes may also put less stress on our financial resources as well. However, if people use the new Mass schedule as an excuse to stop contributing or to go elsewhere, we may experience more financial stress instead. This is why it is important for us to work together in making these plans: clergy and laity, pastoral team, leadership councils, and ministry leaders. These decisions affect our parishes, and so we need to complete the consultations begun last winter so our new Lord’s Day Mass schedule will take as much as possible into account.

We need to implement this new schedule as soon as possible, but I am taking a little more time to finish analyzing the needs of various demographics of parishioners, as well as the needs of our clergy and lay ministers, so we can continue to provide quality liturgies and overall “Sunday experience.” For this reason, between September 2-15, I have scheduled final Mass schedule consultations with the Collaborative Pastoral Council, Sunday Experience Team, clergy and the rest of the Pastoral Team, and both Parish Finance Councils. During the week following our cookout, I’ll explain more on our website about the data and criteria we are considering in this process. It is my sincere desire that we can announce a new Mass schedule before the end of September and aim to implement it sometime in mid-October.

We have reason to have great hope this transition will go smoothly. Even earlier in our time together, I have been pleasantly surprised and greatly impressed in how many parishioners have been able and willing to worship in each other’s church when that Mass time was better for their schedule. Most importantly, we are asking the Holy Spirit to guide us: in deciding the schedule, in how we implement it with our liturgical ministers and all demographics of parishioners, and in how we dedicate ourselves to coming together to strengthen both sets of parish “cousins” - who have become more like brothers and sisters!