Pastor’s Letter: June 17, 2020

Pastor’s Letter: June 17, 2020

19 Jun 2020 | Posted by: chadmin

June 17, 2020

Dear friend,

This Monday (June 22) we will open the Parish Office. The fact that it is summer and that we are still limited with the number of persons to gather for a meeting and the need to responsibly clean used spaces, the Parish Office will be open Monday through Thursday from 8am to noon. These summer hours will help us serve the needs of the parish community and ease back to a full-time schedule toward the fall. Starting this week, the church will be open for private prayer from 3pm to 6pm daily, this allows time for cleaning and better fits the schedule of parishioners coming to pray. We continue to monitor phone messages, 309-682-8642 to the Parish Office and emails to staff, parish@stphils.com. Please don’t hesitate to reach out any time with questions or concerns. As we continue to transition back into the church building for Mass, this week I want to repeat a few of the logistics in place to help us worship together.

It is a true blessing to have parishioners back in church for Mass. For those who have been present for Mass, thank you for the attention and care with following the system we established. The numbering of pews, the direction of foot traffic, and the use of hand sanitizer all are means for us to ease into our communal celebration of the liturgy. Many people have commented on the ease of the process and offered thanks for the safety protocols in place. It is important that we all maintain a similar process to allow those that are more or less concerned to feel comfortable coming to “our” church. As with all things Christian, we live and act for the good of others.

Supply and demand guides so much in our culture. The demand to attend Sunday Mass is much higher than daily Mass. At this point, we have stopped requiring the use of Eventbrite for daily Mass attendance. With our 25% capacity for any one Mass, we have plenty of space for those who choose to attend the 7am or 8am Mass, Monday through Friday or the 8am Saturday. Feel free to join us for Mass, just continue to follow the directives for traffic flow in church and maintaining the appropriate social distancing. For the Sunday Masses, we will continue to use Eventbrite to schedule pews. Continue to communicate with the Parish Office any challenges you have to the process of scheduling attendance at Sunday Mass.

Realizing that not everyone can attend each Sunday, we will continue to distribute the Eucharist to cars in the parking lot after the 4:30pm Saturday Mass, as well as the 9am and 11am Sunday Masses. These three Masses will continue to be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube. You can watch at home or by using our WiFi network in the parking lot, in order to participate in Mass prior to receiving Communion. Please let us know if we can do anything better to accommodate your needs at this time. For information purposes, the last several weeks I’ve been allowed to distribute Communion to residents at Buehler Home on Wednesdays. There are still limitations on Communion minsters taking the Eucharist to homebound parishioners and some limitations for other nursing homes, for safety reasons.

Thank you for the support given to me personally and to our church. I look forward to the day we can live without the current restrictions. Please stay tuned for further information from the parish by email, text message, and our website, www.stphils.com. Have a great week.

God bless,
Father David