What We Heard… and What We Are Doing With It

Last year, our Plainville-Wrentham Catholic Collaborative conducted a survey of area Catholics, which we called “We’re Listening to You”. In addition to those who are actively involved in parish life, we made special efforts to get the word out to those who are not actively participating. Inactive members are notoriously hard to survey, but we did receive a handful of responses from them. Combined with the active members, we received a total of 121 surveys. Thank you again to all who participated! As pastor, I have shared the results that could be tabulated with the Pastoral Team (staff), the Collaborative Pastoral Council, and the Sunday Experience Team. To state the obvious, with a diverse group of parishioners there are a wide variety of responses. When I realized, I was struggling to put the results in a more digestible form to share with all of you, I asked the survey committee to help, and they have provided a helpful report entitled “We’re Listening to You… What We Heard,” which you can read on our website. For those who can’t access the online report, a few printed copies are available in each church.

The report shows there are many things people love about our parishes and activities that help them grow spiritually, so we have been striving to maintain and strengthen these. There are also areas where constructive feedback and advice were needed, and I have been working with parish leaders to try to address as many of these as possible in the short term. The next step is writing our new PWC Pastoral Plan for the next three years, choosing top priorities and setting goals based on the mission of our Church and the needs of our parishes. Please pray we will be open to the Holy Spirit as the new Plan Writing Team is formed with representatives of our Councils, Pastoral Team, and other parishioners, to prayerfully discern where God is leading us next. Our first pastoral plan was very helpful as we strengthened our collaboration, and the Welcome Back priority helped us recover from the pandemic. I look forward to where the Holy Spirit will lead us next!