January 7, 2022
Dear St. Catherine Parish Family, As we begin this new year, I wanted to update you on the status of our finances in the parish. First, I want to express my gratitude to all of you who made a generous end-of-year gift to our parish to help us finish the year strong. Our offertory collections help us to maintain the day-to-day operations of our parish, which includes supporting all of our various ministries and programs, regular administrative, facilities, and utilities expenses, as well as our staff salaries. It is imperative that we maintain a stable weekly offertory in order to provide for the needs of our parish. In that light, I am also grateful to all of you who have committed to regular offertory giving through your stewardship of treasure for this new year. If you have not had a chance to make your stewardship commitment, please click here to fill out an electronic commitment. In addition to our offertory, we have also been able to maintain strong capital campaign revenues. As you may remember, we executed our $4 million capital campaign in April of 2018 in order to build our parish hall, reduce our previous debt, and build a healthy capital reserve for future capital repairs. The campaign was a three-year campaign, although some parishioners made a five-year commitment. I am very excited to say that because of the generosity of so many of our parishioners, we were able to cover the $2.5 million for our parish hall completely, and we have built a very healthy capital reserve which will be extremely important in addressing several upcoming capital repairs and replacements including our new organ (which unfortunately has been delayed due to production and supply chain issues). I am most excited to tell you, however, that we are very close to retiring our previous debt. When I first arrived five years ago, the debt was at approximately $2.1 million. We have been steadily paying down the loan, and we recently made a $300,000 payment and also received an additional $100,000 grant from the archdiocese in recognition of our efforts to aggressively pay down our debt. The current balance of the loan is $400,000, and thanks to those who are continuing to contribute to the capital campaign, I am confident that we will be able to pay off the debt completely no later than April of next year. Thanks again to all of you who support our parish so generously with your stewardship of time, talent, and treasure. I pray that the Lord will continue to bless our efforts to serve Him and build up His body, the Church, here on earth. Sincerely in Christ,
Fr. Neil
