Dear Parishioners,

Thank you for your generous support of your parish community. Our spiritual, educational, and service ministries benefit from your offertory donations each week. Please click here for the 2022-2023 Parish Financial Report.  As you study this annual report, I would like to emphasize a few points.

• Our annual October Mass attendance headcount was about 500 people each weekend for a church that seats 500. We must improve out attendance to continue offering four Masses each weekend. The diocese requests these numbers each year and keeps careful track of them.
• We are moving forward as a parish community with our new parish website, new bulletin format, an enhanced Facebook page, a new faith formation program, and two new youth ministry programs for our young people. We are making progress in all of these area.
• This year we began repaying the $600K debt on the new roof for our school buildings. In addition to that, we have some emergency repair work that needs to be done to our church roof, costing about $60K, which is not in our 2023-2024 budget.
• We are in the process of repairing our church sound system, which has been a problem for quite a few years.  There was also water damage to our pipe organ from a recent church roof leak, which has made our organ console currently inoperable, but repairable for about $15K.
• Currently the diocese is in the process of combining parishes in the city of Joliet. The year after that, they will be looking at parishes throughout the diocese. An increase in our Mass attendance and offertory donations are important to our independence as a parish.
• In the coming year, we are starting a new parish evangelization program, based on the diocesan vision of “catechesis, evangelization, faith into action.” Please click here for more information. Announcements will be made in January regarding this new parish program.

Father James Dvorscak
Pastor