Dear Parishioners,
Bishop Caggiano has determined this Sunday, December 1, 2024, as “Accountability Sunday” in the Diocese of Bridgeport to ensure financial transparency, to communicate to all parishioners and donors that good stewardship is being practiced and to provide a standard report that is consistent and straightforward.
This weekend, every parish in the diocese will publish on its website, its comparative financial results, in a standardized format for the fiscal year which ended on June 30, 2023. This format differs slightly from the format our parish normally uses to report financial information each quarter, but the financial results are consistent.
Our financials, as you will see, show our offertory collections to be steady, however, our overall expenses continue to elevate as utilities and many vendors have increased our costs by 10% to 30%. As a result, in these most challenging inflationary times, our expenses continue to exceed our offertory collections. On a more positive note, we significantly benefitted from the receipt of the Employee Retention Credit (ERC) which was created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This helped us greatly to smoothen out our expenses.
We continue to remain extremely focused to offer the best liturgical and ministerial services possible, as this is so essential for the spiritual growth of our parish. We also need to provide a safe and comfortable campus for our parish community to worship together.
As you know, “Offertory Collections” and our “Annual Parish Appeal” are so critically important for us to maintain our day-to-day parish operations. We deeply appreciate every family that uses our Online Giving Platform or mails in their offertory envelopes or places them in the drop box in the Church Lobby. In our efforts to enhance the offertory collections, Father Marcello during his homily on Stewardship Weekend, respectfully asked each family to prayerfully reflect on their level of offertory giving and if your means allows, to implement an intentional level of giving for the New Year.
By achieving the “2023 Annual Parish Appeal” goal where the funds raised stays at the parish, we were able to address the much needed repairs and maintenance issues on our campus as reflected in our parish bulletin.
Thank you very much and please do not hesitate to call with any questions you may have.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert J. Cavallero
Director of Parish Operations