January 22, 2006

Dear friends in life and in ministry,

It has been a very intense but in the end - a very productive week. Today's column is about a snag that developed in reaching consensus on a new Pastoral Plan for our five parish planning group. For those of you outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester, about eleven years ago, Bishop Clark had the foresight to begin a pastoral planning process to help the parishes of our diocese to have a say in determining their future. While many Bishops either put off the difficult job of planning for a future with fewer and fewer priests, or elected to merge and close parishes without local input, we in the Diocese of Rochester were given the chance to join with neighboring parishes in the planning process.

The first mutually developed pastoral plan for the five parishes of our region was approved in 2001. On Saturday, our Cental Steuben Planning group met to discuss several concerns that my parish council had with a new plan that will guide us through 2011. Thankfully the regional planning group was able to reach compromise and consensus on the concerns of our Council which then unanimously ratified the plan at a brief meeting following our Saturday afternoon Mass.

I am very proud of the progress we have made as a planning group and of my parish council and its representatives on the Central Steuben Catholic Parishes (CSCP) planning group.

I just feel so blessed to be a part of this dynamic parish and the Diocese of Rochester. God is so good!

Ray

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January 22, 2006

CSCP Pastoral Plan Hits Snag
A few weeks ago my weekly bulletin column concerned the Pastoral Plan that was being reviewed by the parish councils of the five Central Steuben Catholic Parishes. The Plan had been developed by the CSCP Implementation and Planning Committee which includes Fr. Gerald O’Connor, Sr. Anne Michelle McGill and me, two representatives of each CSCP parish and Deb Housel, our diocesan planning liaison.

At the December, 2005 CSCP Planning meeting, a timetable was established which would include a review and hopefully approval of the plan by parish councils at their December meetings, distribution of the plan to parishioners on January 8/9, parish town meetings on January 14/15, a CSCP wrap-up meeting on January 22 and submission to Bishop Clark by January 30, 2006.

Unfortunately, a quorum was not present at St. Mary’s December Parish council meeting so no vote could be taken on the plan. This became problematic because when the council did meet on January 10, they were not supportive of the plan as written. Generally, parish council members expressed concerns with the joint vision statement included with the plan and also wanted benchmarks on the actions called for in the plan.

Since I’m writing this column on Tuesday morning, but it will not appear in our bulletin until the weekend, how things will unfold at our CSCP meeting on Saturday morning, January 22 is still a mystery to me. I do pray that we’ll find a way to reach consensus on a Pastoral Plan either at this meeting, or soon after. Our original deadline to submit a plan to Bishop Clark is January 30, 2006, but now it could be delayed a month or so to give us time to reach consensus.

St. Mary’s is blessed to have a parish council that takes their responsibilities very seriously and CSCP representatives (Al Hanning and Paul Wolfe) who have worked so diligently to implement our first CSCP pastoral plan and hammer out a new plan that would be acceptable to the very diverse parishes that make up our region. I’ll keep you informed.

Have a good week. Serve one another well!

Deacon Ray Defendorf

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