Parish Updates: New Life, Capital Campaign Success, and 150 Years of Saint Patrick

A few updates to share with you. First, congratulations to our Director of Worship, Sari Althoff. Sari gave birth on August 13 to a daughter, Anya Isabelle. This is the first child for Sari and her husband Ben. Sari will be enjoying maternity leave until the end of October. If you have any questions regarding liturgy during this time, you can speak to Father Dan or me. We will handle things or pass you along to the proper person who can help in her absence. 

Last week in the bulletin we published the final report for our capital campaign. It was a tremendously successful campaign. Congratulations to our parish on being able to raise the funds needed for several major repairs or upgrades to our church and school. In addition we paid the mortgage on the townhouse where I live and purchased a place right next door for Father Dan to live. We were also able to set aside money for future maintenance projects. Our parish finance council will need to set some parameters regarding how this money is used in the future. If you missed seeing the report in the bulletin, our bulletin is always available via our website. 

As we prepare for another school year, students from the high school will not be allowed to park in our parking lot. The high school has informed us that they have more than enough parking spots for the students. Prior to the renovation at the high school the school district rented part of our parking lot. Since then we had been told by students that there were not enough spots available in the high school lot. We have asked the school district about again renting space in our lot, but they have insisted they have adequate room. The past few years we have sold permits to park in our lot. However we have struggled as many students simply parked in our lot without purchasing a pass. As a result, those who purchased passes didn’t have spaces. We don’t want to get into the business of towing vehicles, so the school district has encouraged us at this time to close off our parking lot to student parking. 

We have completed our year-end financial reports and will be publishing them the weekend after Labor Day. We won’t be mailing out a report this year but will instead print it in the bulletin. Once we publish the report, if you would like to review the complete documents, we will make them available to you. Watch the bulletin the weekend after Labor Day for the report. 

Finally this year we celebrate our 150th year as Saint Patrick Parish. Father Dan has been working hard with a committee in assembling a variety of artifacts from our history and many stories. He has quite an interesting story from our history that he will be sharing this weekend in his homily. If you are not at Saint Patrick’s for Mass this weekend, you might want to check out our livestream that can be accessed by going to either our website or FACEBOOK page. We also have a display of items in the gathering area.