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Dear Fellow Parishioners:
As the members of St. Catharine’s Finance Council, we are pleased to furnish you with the enclosed “ Comparative Summary of Revenues and Expenses” for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2019. To ease comparison year over year, this summary includes data for revenue and expenses for Fiscal Year ’18 as well.
These numbers speak for themselves, but we’d like to bring a few things to your attention. First and foremost, we see that we operated at a deficit last year, a loss of a bit more than $116,000. Our ordinary expenses remained fairly constant, rising about 4%, largely due to an increase in the assessments we paid to the Archdiocese. Our ordinary revenues, however, didn’t keep pace with this increase in our expenses and, in fact, declined about 3%.
The other significant change comes with our “restricted gifts and bequests,” where we had a decline, year over year, of approximately $70,000. These gifts and bequests are most welcome, and, in years past, have covered the shortfall between ordinary revenue and ordinary expenses. Yet as we’ve emphasized in our previous reports, these special gifts and bequests (from a parishioner’s will, for example) are by their very nature irregular, unpredictable, and can vary dramatically over time, as they did this year compared to last, and last year compared to the year before. We can’t assume that we’ll have this income in meaningful amounts every year.
The conclusion we draw from all this is that we must increase our ordinary revenues - the dollars that go in the basket on Sunday and on Christmas and Easter, or that are contributed through Faith Direct. Those revenues have remained basically flat for the last decade, and we’ve reached the point where the inexorable climb in ordinary expenses over those same years gives rise to a significant operating deficit such as we now have. As we’ve heard from the pulpit the past few weeks, we now risk losing programs that have long made our parish life as distinctive and productive as it is.
There is a silver lining here. We’ve studied our situation closely and have concluded that if each of our active households increases its weekly donation by as little as $5.00, we can eliminate our deficit and ensure that we can fund our operating expenses. Our situation will further improve if we all make our donations on line through Faith Direct, as we can then predict, and enjoy, reliable income.
Many thanks for all you do for St. Catharine.
Respectfully,
Michele Theuerkauf, Ann Boyle, Bill Hansen, Bob Hemmer, Dennis Looney, Bob Stickles, Mary Ann Galati (Trustee), Marty Petraitis (Trustee), & Fr. Tom