- St. Thomas More Parish is not presently on a financially sustainable trajectory. Though for a while we have managed to expend and then rebuild our reserve, in recent months we have exhausted our reserve and have now reached a point at which our expenses consistently and significantly exceed our income.
- Payroll for our clergy and staff has been twice delayed, and we have several thousand dollars in outstanding bills.
- We have stalled in our ability to send payments to the generous individuals who loaned us funds ($150,000+) for the renovation of our buildings. And we are often forced to hold Cathedraticum payments to the Ordinariate for months at a time until, by God’s providence, a major gift gives us the ability to pay them all at once.
- The purchase of our campus brought with it substantial new expenses for the congregation we did not have as renters, including utilities, maintenance, snow removal, and exorbitant property & liability insurance.
- Membership in the Ordinariate has brought the new responsibility of the Cathedraticum, the 10% of our income required for the support of our leadership structure in Houston; as well as the newly announced Bishop’s Appeal, whose balance the Parish fully intends to give in full should individual parishioner gifts not reach our goal.
Building utilities are a major expense, as are items that people may ignore when trying to scope financial issues out, like insurance, lawn care, and trash removal. In the snow belt, heating and snow removal probably double utility and maintenance expenses. If St Thomas More, a fairly well-established parish, is grappling with this problem, I've simply got to ask what the financial picture really is at St John the Baptist Bridgeport, PA.
The letter asks, "If we have been on this trajectory for a long time, why the eleventh hour notice?" Its answer:
As Fr. Bergman has communicated, for two years now the Parish has been on track to be the beneficiary of a significant new income stream: the re-opening – thanks to generous benefactors – of a Catholic bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Scranton whose projected income figures were very promising; all proceeds were to support our Parish and School. Sadly, through no fault whatsoever of our benefactors nor the Parish, the project has ground to an abrupt halt and is likely headed for the courts.Frankly, I doubt if the idea of a Catholic bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Scranton (!) was ever realistic -- bookstores, Catholic or not, have never been, and certainly are not now, gold mines. Food operations require attentive, experienced management. Get real: a parish with membership in the hundreds is never going to be able to take over facilities that were necessarily abandoned by parishes with memberships in the thousands.
I'm glad to see that the parish has dropped the bookstore and the school from its planning. What I've been able to pick up from diocesan parishes is that schools require enrollments in the neighborhood of 200+ to be viable at all, and this isn't going to happen in a new Ordinariate parish. The time, energy, and optimism that went into planning for both the bookstore and the school were, the Scranton parish now seems to acknowledge, not well spent. This seems to have allowed the parish to disregard the financial messages it was actually receiving.
Prudence is one of the cardinal virtues. False optimism should not override it. Mr Murphy at the Ordinariate Expats site has said he deals in optimism, but in simply passing on blue-sky estimates, as he consistently has, from parishes like St Thomas More Scranton -- and likely St John the Baptist Bridgeport -- he is doing long-term damage to the prospect of the Ordinariates.
