At the Heart of Our Mission: The Eucharist

A Message From Parish Leadership:

In the bulletin this month we are sharing Mission Goals in the weekly bulletin articles. These four goals are the fruit of months of dialogue and discernment about the mission of our parish. We, as parish staff, pastoral council, and finance council, look forward to laboring with you in striving to meet these goals in the year ahead and beyond.

Our second mission goal is to enhance the Eucharistic life of our parishioners through the joyful and reverent celebration of the Mass. On Easter Sunday of 2024 we gave out green bracelets that displayed the words “The Main Thing.” Fr. John explained in his homily that “The Main Thing” for a Christian is the Paschal Mystery; Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Where and when do we most deeply and regularly encounter Christ’s Paschal Mystery? It is at the Mass.

Pope Leo told a group of altar servers in August that: "The celebration of Mass saves us today! It saves the world today! It is the most important event in the life of the Christian and in the life of the Church, because it is the encounter in which God gives himself to us for love, again and again."

The time of Eucharistic Revival in the U.S. Catholic Church is real. We have noticed that in three key areas: participation in Eucharistic Adoration, participation in daily Mass, and participation in Sunday Mass. 

We are grateful to have 65 hours each week available for Eucharistic Adoration in our newly-named Solanus Casey Chapel. We have seen a consistent increase in daily Mass attendance with regularly over 45 people in our 55-seat chapel and now with new individuals joining our Wednesday evening Mass in the church. Mass attendance averaged over 1,000 per weekend in 2025 for the first year since 2019 and we have seen some weekends where our Mass attendance exceeds 1,200 individuals. We hope to see in the next year our Mass attendance average more than 1,200 per weekend.

More individuals attending the Mass means that we need joy-filled and mission-minded individuals to give of themselves in service for hospitality, liturgical ministry, and safety. We are immensely grateful for those who already give of themselves generously in service of the Lord at every Sunday Mass. In lieu of our recent increase in Mass attendance we have noticed two things. First, we want to serve people better. Second, we want to protect our clergy, staff, and volunteers from overextending themselves in ministry.

Thus, we want to increase the number of volunteers we have assisting at the Sunday Mass while also decreasing the expectation of frequency that we place upon our volunteers. Our hope is that we may increase the number of volunteers who regularly assist at Mass to 200 from our current total of 150. With this total of volunteers we can regularly have the 30 volunteers we need for each Mass while also setting the expectation that an individual only needs to volunteer once every three weekends.