We are very happy to have Father Vesely here this weekend to celebrate the 4pm Mass on Saturday when we will present him with a gift on behalf of the parish. He is celebrating his 65th Anniversary of Ordination (which is Wednesday, December 18th). We are very grateful that he has served the Church so faithfully over 65 years, and we are especially happy that he has served the people of St. Leo the Great for many years in his retirement. Bishop Perez will be celebrating Mass at 9:30am this Monday at Mount Alverna where Father Vesely lives and I will be there to concelebrate along with his classmates. Though seating is limited, I know of some parishioners who will be there as well. May he have many more years!
Before some people ever see the inside of our church, they visit us first on our parish website, leothegreat.org. Many people today look for information on websites before calling or visiting a certain place, and that includes church- es. So Google reached out to us (as St. Leo the Great is easily found through Google Maps which is on millions of smartphones as well as on the internet), and offered us the option of taking professional pictures of the inside of our church. These pictures were then stitched together by Google to provide 360° views of the inside of the church and they provide a wonderful “tour” of our beautiful worship space. Google then gives us the rights to use these pictures and views as we wish. So we will be updating our website with these as well. (Since they took these pictures while our shrines were being worked on, they will come back now that they are finished & take new pictures of the shrines which are completed).
We also have access to the analytical information which details how many visitors we get to our website as well as details on what they are looking for and even how they found us. So you may be surprised to learn that in the last 30 days, we have had 2,115 visits to our website. 1,321 people found us through a search engine (such as through Google), 663 came to us directly (by typing in leothegreat.org) and 111 found us through social media. Our home page received 1,002 page views, our parish bulletins had 683 visits, and 212 people had looked at our page about our school staff while 201 were looking for school information and forms. Finally, 1,126 people viewed our website using their mobile device (smartphone), 834 on their desktop browser and 155 on their tablet (such as an iPad). I share all this technical information with you to show how important our website is for providing current information about our parish commu- nity and our parish school. Again, it is the preferred way for many people to find us, contact us and get information about us. So if someone asks you about our parish, please suggest that they visit our website (the “URL” or Internet address is found on this bulletin you are reading). We are also working on a new website for our parish school which will be linked from our homepage and will let you know when that is live.