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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 Summary of Revenues and Expenses (click here) for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2018. To ease comparison year over year, this Summary includes revenues and expenses for Fiscal Year ’17 as well.
These numbers speak for themselves, but we’d like to bring a few things to your attention. You’ll see that the parish’s annual “ordinary expenses” are now almost $1,100,000, yet our “faith giving” (that which goes in the basket or via Faith Direct) during the course of the year falls well short of that. Our ordinary income is still $50,000 shy of what we need to cover ordinary expenses.
This fiscal year the $50,000 shortage was covered by a boost from “special gifts and bequests,” which amounted to just over $87,000. The parish deeply appreciates this generosity, but we’re mindful of the fact that we can’t count on this kind of income to continue in the years to come. By their very nature, “special gifts and bequests” are non-recurring and can vary substantially from one year to the next, as is evidenced with the falloff from FY’17 to FY’18 of $50,000. Most special gifts are earmarked for special projects or non-recurring capital projects, as was the case again in FY ’18.
Of our total capital expenditures of $53,410 in FY ’18, the largest expenditures were the much-needed new steps to our front entrance and the Holmes Building renovation due to the fire. The majority of these costs were covered by what we received from the Archdiocese for the Living Stones campaign and insurance reimbursements. However, their total costs exceeded the incoming funds. Rather than cutting corners on these projects to get short-term savings, we concluded that using the best materials, employing the best workmanship, and including much needed upgrades for these projects made the most sense in the long term, insuring that these upgrades would last and provide benefit to the parish for years to come.
A final thought: while we normally don’t like to think of it this way, doing the Lord’s Work is, in some respects, a business like any other. Any business requires regular income. As a parish we need to keep that in mind, and to be as generous as we possibly can in our faith giving, not just on special occasions like Christmas and Easter (as important as they are), but throughout the year as well. Therefore, we ask for your continued support to help eliminate the ordinary income shortage, so we can continue to serve our parishioners well and maintain our many wonderful parish ministries.
Many thanks for your generosity and for all you do for St. Catharine.
Respectfully,
Michele Theuerkauf
Ann Boyle
Bill Hansen
Bob Hemmer
Bob Stickles
Dennis Looney
Mary Ann Galati (Trustee)
Marty Petraisis (Trustee)
Father Tom