A Note From Our Pastor: October 12, 2025

As you’ve heard briefly mentioned or have seen for yourself, our Sunday bulletin has been spruced up and now serves both of our parishes.

Two weekends ago, you might have noticed in the bulletin, two pages that provided an update for Partners in the Gospel. This update was primarily a layout of the demographics information we gathered from surveys that we had administered with you all, back in July. These pages also included a brief synopsis of what’s been done up to this point, but also what lies immediately ahead for  Partners in the Gospel. To be clear, we are following the steps that the archdiocese has laid out for us.

If you weren’t able to see these pages, you can go to our parish website and click on the bulletin tab and open the online bulletin for September 28.

But another item in the bulletin that I want to call out is the weekly reporting of financial giving (Ordinary Income). You’ll find this on the second page of each week’s bulletin. The following image shows what we reported in last week’s bulletin.

I want to explain how we determine the YTD goal as you see it listed in the image. To make it simple, we took the total year’s goal for Ordinary Income (for St. Philomena, it’s $835,000 and for St. Thomas, it’s $410,000) and to divide it by 52 (the number of weeks in the year). For St. Philomena, the weekly goal is $16,048 and for St. Thomas, it’s $7,885. Thus, each week, the YTD goal is increased, incrementally, by these respective amounts.

Perhaps it’s also helpful to understand that for the Archdiocese and its parishes, our fiscal year starts on July 1st and ends on June 30th. In the image above, you can see that in each parish, we are currently below the goal. That’s not uncommon for this time of year. What usually happens is that as we get toward Christmas, we should see that we are moving closer to YTD goal (Let’s together make that happen, please!). I hope this explanation helps. I encourage you to monitor our progress.

I want to again, express my heartfelt gratitude for your generosity, for all the ways you support the parish and witness to the mission of Jesus Christ.

Yours in Christ,

Father Todd O. Strange