Beacons – October Count – Youth
Last weekend we announced an important item concerning the Beacons of Light process. The official families of parishes will be announced on the weekend of December 4/5. These past few weeks have been extremely interesting. On October 1, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati released the latest draft concerning parish groupings. The entire public was offered an opportunity to comment on the draft until October 20. The Archdiocese received 7,822 comments ranging from insightful suggestions about the groupings to angry comments about the Church in general and “I don’t care what you do, just keep my priest.”
It is beautiful these comments have been taken very seriously. Your insights and grassroots experience was heard and analyzed. Granted not every suggestion can be accepted; many of them contradict each other. The suggestions went through analysis and more consulting. By this point they may already be decided, we are simply waiting for the communication to funnel down. The communication is rather complicated because it involves working with the website team, collaborating with local media, informing the priests a couple days before the general public, and utilizing the Catholic Telegraph. I will eagerly be awaiting December 4th and 5th.
On a related note, every October, dioceses throughout the country, including the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, ask every parish and chapel to count the number of Mass attenders for Saturday Vigil and Sunday Masses. We’ve been counting every Sunday since January 2020, which gives us a little more complete data. Below you’ll find a comparison in October Count data from the previous years.
The data largely speaks for itself, but I want to mention one item. First our attendance dropped about 11% before and after the pandemic (although the pandemic isn’t quite finished). Overall that seems fairly decent. Many parishes have experienced 25-50% drops during the pandemic.
Over the last couple months, I’ve been really impressed by the ministry happening for our youth. For vocations awareness week, we had a visit by Fr. Dan Schmitmeyer, the Vocation Director for the Archdiocese and the Carmelite Daughters of St. Elias, a group of religious sisters based out of Cincinnati. Alongside these two awesome evenings were a couple of parent nights for teens and their parents. We discussed the importance of prayer and both evenings seemed rather powerful. Also our parishes recently hosted a reinvented retreat for second graders and their parents who will soon participate in the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the first time. The work that our youth team is doing is really wonderful. It is a blessing to work alongside Angie Soules, Denise Sheipline, Valerie Christman, and Natalie Patricia-Agosto.
Have a blessed Thanksgiving and I look forward to the start of Advent next week!
In Christ,
Fr. Sean Wilson
