I want to express our sympathy to Eleanor Tanner and to her two daughters Chris and Cindy on the death of their husband/ father, James Tanner, who had been in the nursing home for some time. I also want to ask your prayers for Dorothy Forester, mother of Judy Ladaika, who also died recently. Because of COVID19, both families have decided to have funeral services at a later time, but I wanted to acknowledge their loss and assure them of our prayers.
You will notice on our website that besides the opportunity to ask me to light a vigil candle for you at one of our shrines in the church, you may also purchase a Great Sweepstakes Raffle ticket as well, using a credit or debit card. We can have it ready for you to pick up in the rectory office (when we reopen) or we can mail it to you, or you can give us the information for it over the phone. And besides the ability to configure your online contributions through WeShare, you can also make a one-time donation to the parish as well by choosing the menu item called “Online Commerce” at the top right of our website. We are attempting to make online information and services more available to you, especially during this time when our rectory office and church needs to be closed. Please feel free to suggest other products or services we can offer on our website for your convenience.
I also wanted to point out that there is a search function on our website which makes it very easy for you to find anything you’re looking for, past or present. For example, you can search for “online Mass” or “raffle”, and within seconds, it will present you with a list of items you can choose from. It will even search inside for past pastor and news blogs.
Our thanks to Phil Bukovsky for his donation of several holy water bottles. We planned on handing these out to you on Holy Saturday but we had to cancel the blessing of food baskets. But we’ll be sure to make good use of them in the future so thanks to Phil for his thoughtful donation.
We also received a generous donation in the amount of $5,000 from a parishioner at Easter but we did not include that in the Easter collection in our bulletin so I wanted to offer our gratitude to this parishioner for that very kind contribution. Again, thanks to all of you for dropping your contribution envelopes inside the rectory office door slot or for mailing them in. I’m just amazed at how many of you are so conscientious about that during a time when so many churches are suffering financially because of the quarantine. So please accept my appreciation to you for supporting us in that way during this time.
Like you, I’m anxiously awaiting for further news from the Governor (and from the Diocese) on when and how we will be gathering together again. Of course I will let you know as soon as I hear anything. If we didn’t have the internet technology we have today, how different (& difficult) it would be to keep everyone informed. So I’m glad that so many of you have been able to watch the online Masses from our website or elsewhere, and I look forward to celebrating the Eucharist with you in again in person.