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Award-winning content for your parish bulletin and website | Advent and Lent - Bulletin and parish website resources

Great parishes begin with invitation and inspiration. Let us help you in your important tasks of engaging your congregation with great content for your bulletin and parish website. Please browse the PREPARE THE WORD Library or enter a search term to find just the right item to pass on to your congregation. Consider including one or more of the following items in your next parish publication: Take Five for Faith Exploring the word Homily stories Questions Catholics ask Advent | Lent handouts

Authors PTW staff

Quotes parish bulletin website inserts
Charitable cutbacks? Parish the thought!

25 Dec 2011 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The various Christmas liturgy readings, as well as those for its Octave a Sunday later, are filled with good news and glad tidings. The news on the charitable-giving front, however, is decidedly more mixed. While one survey suggests people in the U.S. give more to help others than the residents of any other country, another survey reveals that charitable contributions to Catholic parishes--and the charities that rely on them--have been feeling the pinch of the financial downturn. Americans give more to help others than the residents of 152 other countries, according to a survey released by the Charities Aid Foundation of about 1,000 residents in each country who were asked whether they had donated money to a charity, volunteered their time, or helped a stranger in the previous month. At the same time, contributions in the U.S. declined at more than half of Catholic parishes from 2008 through 2010, according to a survey by the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University. Consequently, about 55 percent of parishes reported that they have reduced the amount of money they contribute to mission projects and charities. Other responses to falling donations included: postponed or canceled building projects or capital campaigns (53 percent of respondents); salary reductions or freezes (52 percent); delayed hiring for staff positions (30 percent); and layoffs or furloughs (22 percent). “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” promises the Christmas Day reading from the Gospel of John, but as the economic gloom continues, some of the steps parishes have had to take to balance their budgets might become permanent, says Charles Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management. “One of the first things they cut back on was giving to charity,” Zech said. “That might be a permanent theme, that the church looks more inward and takes care of its own needs first as opposed to benevolences and charity to outside groups.” Sources: Articles by Nicole Wallace and the editors for The Chronicle of Philanthropy

americans charitable giving charities aid foundation parishes charles zech center for the study of church management

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Rust-belt parish plants are perishing

22 Jan 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“The world in its present form is passing away,” warns Saint Paul in the reading from 1 Corinthians this Sunday. The urban parish landscape in which many older Catholics grew up is also passing away. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the church in the United States has lost 1,359 parishes during the past 10 years, or 7.1 percent of the national total, and most of those have been in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. From Philadelphia to Newark, New York to Boston, Cleveland to Chicago to Detroit and beyond, the church of immigrants is going the same route as the old industrial America of our forebears, said the National Catholic Reporter (NCR). “The huge plants--churches, schools and parish halls--markers of another era, like the hulking steel mills and manufacturing plants of old, can no longer be sustained,” the paper said. “There aren’t enough Catholics left in those places, not enough priests and nuns, and certainly not enough money to maintain the church as it once was.” “I’m developing a theory that one of our major challenges today is that American Catholic leadership is being strangled by trying to maintain the behemoth of the institutional Catholicism that we inherited from the 1940s and ’50s,” New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told NCR’s John Allen. The changes go deeper than bricks and mortar to the psychology and practice of what it means to be Catholic today. “We have before us a generation of young adults and young Catholics who are negotiating life and faith in a wholly different way,” Franciscan Father David B. Couturier said in a speech last October to the Council of Priests of New York State. The story is different in the West and Southwest and even some areas of the East Coast, where the problem pastoral planners often face is how to build facilities fast enough and how to handle growth caused by population shifts and immigration. The church in these areas is also different as well--more informal and celebratory, less formal and legalistic than the primarily Irish-Catholic model back east, observers said. “We’re more pastorally oriented and less systematically structured” than a lot of Anglo parishes, said Ted Furlow, director of pastoral planning for the San Bernardino diocese in Southern California. “It’s faith, family, fiesta--Catholic folklorico.” Source: An article by Tom Roberts for the National Catholic Reporter

timothy dolan united states parishes rust belt david b couturier ted furlow

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What is our project?

Short essays about observed trends in Roman Catholic life - Pastoral trends

What are we supposed to be doing as a Catholic community in our time and place? At one level, of course, our Catholic Christian project is always the same, and the gospels and Catholic tradition describe it well. At another level, though, each time and place has its own particular project, just as each of us may be said ultimately to have our own particular purpose. Our family lives, personal gifts, careers, and life situations are all different. The same is true for the church. Just consider: The project of Catholics in California during the late 1700s was to build up the missions, while the project of Catholics in the 13 colonies was to establish a certain level of respect and avoid persecution. The project of Catholics in the big cities of the United States during the years of large numbers of European immigrants was to build parishes and schools to engender pride, identity, and commitment. Today, the U.S.--and numerous individual parishes themselves-are more diverse than ever before. It is now especially hard to say that a single project or even a predominant one exists for the Catholic community in the United States. But surely there are unique projects for specific Catholic parishes and groups today and particular purposes to which Catholics and their faith communities are called. How much time do we spend discerning our purpose or carrying out our project? The projects of past generations are easy to take for granted today; they appear so obvious to us. And of course the tasks of previous generations do seem clear-from hindsight. But not necessarily for those generations and perhaps most of all not for us today. That does not, however, absolve us from identifying our purpose, nor does it suggest we have no particular purpose or special task in building up the church in our time. It simply suggests we need to know our purpose as church and as a Catholic faith community and Catholic people today all the more--and then to seek it. © 2008, Bryan Froehle.

Authors Bryan Froehle

mission parish

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Who's listening?

15 Feb 2009 - Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

The term leprosy as used in these readings should not be narrowly interpreted to include only those who suffered from Hansen’s disease. In the biblical era, anyone with a visible sore or skin condition might be said to have leprosy. What was true of all of these people was that they were likely to be feared, shunned, and excluded from the full life of the community. Within your community, perhaps it’s best to think today of people who are not present and why: parishioners in nursing homes parishioners in prison unemployed people ashamed to leave the house people whose marriage has failed people who suffer mental illness people who don’t feel they are “good enough” to be in church.

leprosy Community parishioner prision mental illness nursing homes

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