January 16, 2005
Continued Charity
Changing
of the Guard
Last week Father Kevin Dillon moved to his new parish, St. Jude’s
in Mastic Beach. If you’d like to stay in touch, his address is:
89 Overlook Drive
Mastic Beach , NY 11951
You can see the St. Jude’s Website at: www.stjudemb.org
We wish Father Dillon well and send him to the people of St. Jude’s
with our love and prayers.
This week we’ll see the arrival of our new Associate Pastor, Father
John Derasmo. He has been the pastor of Resurrection Parish in Farmingville
and comes with rich spiritual experience and pastoral wisdom.
It’s never easy to leave a parish where you get to be so fully
involved in the lives of the people so the welcome to a new parish is
so very important. How can you personally make Father John feel welcome
here?
At
College?
At St. Brigid’s we like to stay in touch through
e-mail “letters from home.”
Once a person has an e-mail address at school (or if he/she uses a personal
address), please let us know what it is so we can include them when
we write.
Here's a handy college link so you
can send this info online.
e-mail Father Ralph:
Past Columns:
January 9: Migration
January 2:All is bright?
December 26:
A Blessed Christmas
December 19: Here comes everybody!
December 12: The Journey Continues
December 5: Visions of Sugarplums
Columns from 2004
Columns from 2003
Columns from 2002
A
recent story in the in daily papers noted that while people were responding
generously to the appeals for Tsunami relief (and sometimes getting ripped-off
by unscrupulous con-artists posing as charitable organizations) local
charities were left suffering with empty shelves or little operating money.
At St. Brigid’s, we don’t
have that problem. The Tsunami relief donations were over $12,000 (and
still coming in) and so much food came in recently that our shelves are
filled to overflowing. (We’re actually sharing some of our food
with another parish whose food bank is almost empty.) Our Christmas fund
collection was over $117,000 (up over last year) and that allows us to
do many good things in our parish. (Thank you, thank you!)
The one area we’ve been “stuck”
in over the past couple of years is the Catholic Ministries Appeal. We
reached 82% of our goal last year (and received a rebate of over $7,000).
Thank you to all who participated in this campaign. But too few people
got involved in this project which supports the charitable and pastoral
activities of the church on Long Island. We actually benefited in a big
way from the diocese this past year. They just cut our insurance rates
this fall. We just received $100,000 in a grant for our school. Our Outreach
programs receive funding and support through Catholic Charities. and still
some people say “I’m not going to support the Catholic Ministries
Appeal.”
Since I’ve been here I’ve
asked the diocese to help us out a bit -- one year they reduced our goal;
another year they didn’t give us an increase. I’ve been very
happy with the help and cooperation I’ve gotten from “downtown”.
So I feel badly that many families give nothing to support this charitable
campaign -- though they are generous on many other levels. So I’d
like to take this opportunity as we kick off this year’s campaign
for the Catholic Ministries Appeal to ask those who haven’t participated
in the past to please join those of us who have. It’s easy -- just
fill in a pledge card and drop it in the collection. (You can pay your
pledge over time.) Or make a pledge online
at the parish website. Twenty percent of what we collect in this campaign
will be returned to us directly, so your participation again helps locally
too.,
You are Person
