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Holy Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday
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From Father Larry Adams
On behalf of the clergy and staff of Christ the Divine Shepherd Parish, I’d like to wish you and your family a blessed Easter Holiday! Christ is Risen! Indeed he is risen!
It’s been a difficult twelve months for all of us. Around this time last year, the “stay-at-home” pandemic restrictions necessitated that we temporarily suspend public attendance at Masses in our churches. Nevertheless, ten weeks later, we reopened for public attendance at Mass, and we’ve been celebrating publicly-accessible Masses throughout the past ten months! Naturally, we took steps to ensure the safety of everyone at our liturgies through social distancing and wearing of masks. As we continue to move through our response to the pandemic, we’ve been actively monitoring our processes and modifying them with prudence and patience as it seems appropriate to do so. Things aren’t completely back to normal yet, but the signs we’ve been seeing have been filling us with confidence that the end of pandemic restrictions is on the horizon. With this in mind, our parish staff has been discerning how we might best adjust our procedures and policies in order to minister effectively to you and to maintain your confidence in the safety of our environment at our liturgies!
As we move forward, we hope to renew a number of ministries in the parish:
- Youth ministry: in 2020, as we began our journey as Christ the Divine Shepherd Parish, we began looking at how we might minister to our youth. A LifeTeen program had previously existed at one of our predecessor parishes, and an active youth ministry program was in existence at another. In early 2020, we faced a number of challenges: no unified youth ministry program existed in our parish; in addition, our youth minister resigned in January; finally, the COVID pandemic prevented us from moving forward with plans for a summer mission trip or even continued meetings and activities. As we prepare to move from “pandemic response mode” toward a more familiar and normal mode of activities, we’d like to discern how to resume ministry for the young people of our parish! Our parish’s current financial situation creates a context in which we cannot afford to hire an additional staff member as youth minister at present. Therefore, we would like to begin a discussion within the parish, and ask you for your recommendations of how we might proceed – what vision do we have for youth ministry at CDS? What leadership is needed? What extent of volunteer participation is required? How might we initiate this process? If you would like to see an active youth ministry in our parish, we invite you to attend a “Zoom” meeting to begin the discussion of how to renew youth ministry at CDS! If you’re interested in participating in this discussion, please sign-up at our Flocknote site (www.flocknote.com/ChristTheDivineShepherd), and join the “Youth Ministry” group. We’ll plan a Zoom meeting and announce it in that Flocknote group!
- Communion calls: In October, our ability to return to at-home communion calls was delayed by the pandemic restrictions. Recently, however, we were again given permission to resume communion calls for those who are unable to join us at our liturgies. (This inability to be present might include those who are homebound, or are unable to find a way to get to church. In the present circumstances, this might also include those who find it unsafe to return to attendance at church at the present.). We are currently looking to “reboot” our communion call EMHC team. We’d like to get a feel for the extent of the need for at-home communion calls. If you (or a loved one) would like a minister of communion to bring the Eucharist to you at home, please let us know! Please reach out to Deacon Mike at mkelly@cdsmph.orgor 412-373-0050 x112, and let him know that you’d like to resume communion calls to your home!
Finally, I would like to ask you to check your mail – a week or two ago, we mailed out a spring newsletter to all registered parishioner families. This mailing also included information about this year’s PSP program. It also includes a survey that we’d ask you to fill out and mail back to us! The survey is also available at www.cdsmph.org/springQ -- please consider filling out the survey and letting us know your reaction to the newsletter, and let us know what’s on your mind!
We wish your family a blessed Easter season! We hope to see you at Mass during this joyful season!
Blessings,
Fr Larry
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