Why the Change?

Throughout our Set Ablaze pastorate planning process, Bishop DeGrood has asked each pastorate in the Diocese to review their mass schedules in order to provide greater access to mass outside of the work day and reduce duplication of mass times in Churches that are near to each other. Our pastorate planning committee also set a goal to “Develop a sacrament and mass schedule that allows for flexibility of worship within the pastorate and greater availability of priests to serve our ministries excellently.” In order to fulfill the Bishop’s desire and our goal as a pastorate, we have decided to revise our daily mass and confession schedule. Our weekend Mass schedule will not change.  The following are the main objectives of the Mass schedule change; to reduce duplication of mass times, to create more mass times outside of the workday, and to reduce the number of masses in our pastorate to two masses a day. 

The process by which we determined the new daily Mass schedule was first in consultation with the pastorate planning committee; it was recommended to the priests that we develop a schedule that we were comfortable with in light of our own work and ministries. We developed a schedule with the above objectives in mind and then conducted a survey of select parishioners and daily mass-goers within our pastorate to have a round of feedback. Based on the feedback we received from the parishioners that we could in act upon while still fulfilling our main goals, we decided on the daily Mass schedule below.

This daily mass schedule will begin on July 2, 2024, and run throughout the next year. After that year, we will have another round of evaluation to see if this achieves our goals. The Set Ablaze process is a continual process of evaluation and discernment to understand how we can best serve the people of this pastorate for decades to come.