BISHOP'S APPEAL 2019As someone who's used to seeing such appeals in diocesan bulletins, I was surprised to see the minimal amounts listed, both for the asking and the pledge from the parish. I wonder, in fact, if whoever typed this left out a zero or something. I'm used to seeing amounts in the high five figures in arcdiocesan parishes, with shortfalls much smaller.Saint Barnabas has been asked to contribute $5,000 to the 2019 Bishop's Appeal. Nearly $1,000 has been pledged, and any shortfall will be billed to the parish, so please consider making a contribution as part of your end-of-the-year giving. See the Ordinariate website to make a contribution. Payments must be received by the Ordinariate by December 31 in order to count toward this year's asking.
So I decided to dig a little deeper. The median household income in Omaha, NE is $56,406. Let's take that as a basis to estimate how much income the parish would have if every pledging entity tithed and followed the normal recommendations from the bishops, which would be 5% to the parish and 5% to other charities including the bishop's appeal. Further, let's assume 50 pledging entities in the parish.
The ordinariate Guide to Parish Development puts minimum size for a full parish, which St Barnabas is, at 30 families. In the absence of better information, we'll say a family is simply a pledging entity and peg that number for St Barnabas at 50. Even if it's not exact, this will give us an idea of the general scope we're dealing with. We'll assume each family or pledging entity makes $56,400 per year, although if these people used to be Episcopalian, it might well be higher. (It's probably not lower, though.)
So each pledging entity would tithe $5640 per year, of which 5%, or $2820, would go to the parish pledge and another 5%, or $2820, would go to other charities, including the bishop's appeal. If in fact St Barnabas has 50 pledging entities, and they're all tithing, that would make 50 x $2820 or $141,000 available for the bishop's appeal. No need to direct it all to the bishop's appeal, of course, there are many other worthy charities, but you'd think the bishop's appeal might be an important one among them.
Instead, according to the parish bulletin, all of $1000 had been pledged to the bishop's appeal for all of 2019, as of December 1. That amounts to $20 per pledging entity if there are 50 of them.
"Aren't you expecting a lot to ask these people to tithe?" someone might ask. Well, at least to judge from the fancy-schmancy 20-page Sunday mass leaflet, plus the business about kneeling and on the tongue, these people take their religion very, very seriously. You'd think they'd back it up from their household budgets, huh? So maybe one explanation is someone mistyped and left out a zero from the asking and the pledge.
Because as I understand this, although the annual quotas for the bishop's appeal for each parish aren't published, we do know that they're a proportion of the parish tithe that's sent to Houston. That Houston should expect only $5,000 from one of its 11 full parishes is somewhat disturbing, leaving aside only $1000 has been pledged. This has got to be a typo, or I have this wrong in some other way. Can someone set me straight on this? My profuse apologies to the parish in advance if I've got this wrong, because I'm just scratching my head here.
The other thing that makes me wonder if I have this wrong is that performance on the bishop's appeal is, at least in our archdiocese, a key measure of parish, and the priest's, performance. I shudder to think what would happen to a pastor who'd had an 80% shortfall on the bishop's appeal in a Los Angeles archdiocesan parish. That it would be an 80% shortfall on an utterly trivial quota would be just the icing on the cake.
If I don't have this wrong, on the other hand, it makes me wonder if there's a lot else that isn't being made public in the North American ordinariate that maybe people should be taking much more seriously. Keep in mind that until very recently the Our Lady of the Atonement parish was thought to be a great success story. Now its pastor is in disgrace, it's a focus of the overall Church abuse scandal, and it hovers on the brink of bankruptcy.
It does seem to me that the parishioners in Omaha are delighted to be special, unique, even nearly separate from their fellow Catholics as long as they don't have to make any sacrifices.
I guess that's what riding first class is all about.
