A big thank you to all the volunteers making wonderful events happen this week at our three churches: the “New to You” Rummage Sale at IHM, the Fall Festival at SSP, and the Quilt Bingo at SJB. It’s great to have moments for fellowship. Without the generous gift of your time and talent, these events would not happen!

I’ve invited the SSP Board of Education to undertake a strategic planning process for our school. To help shape the process, we’d love to have your thoughts. We’ll have a listening session this Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023, at 7 p.m. in the SSP Parish Hall, and everyone is invited to attend! Also, we are asking our community some questions about our school in a short survey, which you can access online at www.sspstl.org/school-strategic-plan. If you prefer a paper version, you can find some in the back of each of our churches.

On to more questions!

Do kids and non-Catholics have to see Fr. Nord for blessings at communion? Monsignor doesn't give blessings.

Both Msgr. Bommarito and I are happy to give blessings to kids and adults at communion. If you come up twice, you can be doubly blessed. (I am joking! One blessing works fine.) We have slightly different styles; Msgr. Bommarito’s blessing is quieter, which may be why you had the impression he does not give blessings. 

Is there less for the servers to do now that there is more clergy?

We are very grateful to have servers at Mass! They help light the candles before Mass, they help prepare what we need for Mass, they help with the books when it is time to pray, they help with the gifts, they help with washing the priest’s hands, and they help with the bells. As time goes on, we might find other jobs for them to help with, too. Please remember that we are learning how to celebrate well together little by little! We moved some of the sacred vessels for Mass closer to the altar, which means that preparing the altar goes a little faster and the servers don’t have to bring the sacred vessels over from the side.

Why is our bulletin no longer in color?

We self-publish our bulletin, and our calculations suggest that we would save $1,624 by printing in black and white. We do publish some parish communications in color, but since we make 52 bulletins a year, the savings with black and white were significant.

Wouldn't it be better for the environment and finances to use the hymnals (which are good for an entire year) instead of using up hundreds of sheets of paper every week? All that trash to dispose of and more trees destroyed.

With three churches, buying one-year hymnals would cost us about $4,500 and would be about 500,000 pages of paper; worship aids for a year cost about $3,600 and are about 300,000 pages of paper. (I’m comparing the number of pages because both our worship aids and standard one-year hymnals use similar sized pages.) That being said, we use worship aids because for newcomers, they are easier to use than the standard one-year hymnals. We want our church to grow, so we want it to be easy for new people to pray with us. We’d probably use worship aids even if they cost more and used more paper.

It seems like most of the people helping as hospitality ministers came from IHM. Why is that?

Before August 1, 2023, IHM had the biggest hospitality ministry, SJB had the second biggest, and SSP had the third biggest. For the sake of getting started fast, we started the combined SSP hospitality ministry by asking everyone who had served in the past to continue serving. We’d love to have more hospitality ministers. If you want to serve, please talk to Debbie Gartner or Karen Garcia!

Remember: Healing prayer after all Masses next weekend. Thanks for the great questions and God bless you!