235/365 Looking Backward

When I raised my hand in 2005 and said that I might just be interested in parish council, I had to write some essays. This is funny to me now because writing is one of those things that just happens for me, but I'm sure it was used as a weed-out activity. Get them to jump through this hoop and whatever applications we get, we'll consider at that point. One of the questions was, Over the next five years, what are the three most important areas in parish life at St. Pius V for growth and vitality to be cultivated and sustained?

My first answer involved drawing out new leadership at the parish level, which I admitted then and still think now, is a problem at any parish, in any organization (I know this from being on the ground floor of a new school and my involvement in La Leche League and Girl Scouts). So that wasn't any big thing. But I was rereading my second answer this evening and it really struck me. Not that I'm some kind of prophet, but here we are 5 years later and I think we have cultivated in this area.

I wrote that I thought St. Marge was more of a threat than a neighbor. I wrote that while Mike and I automatically chose our parish because it was in a public location, because my grandmother recommended it (she knew Fr. Bill), because we tried out a few other parishes and ours fit best, while Mike and I did that, all our other Catholic neighbors at the time belonged to St. Marge. One even told me during a conversation about parishes, that she hoped we'd still talk to them if they chose St. Marge over us. I asked her if she'd ever been to our parish. She shrugged. She wasn't interested in an immigrant parish, in a parish in trouble.

And we were in trouble. We had about 300 families and our school had closed. We'd merged with another school, one that was already supported by several parishes. And within a year of that conversation with my neighbor, we were threatened with closing. She was right that way. It was a struggle and it was amazing that we came through.

Five years later, our school is growing. The bulletin mentioned they have 200 children starting this year. We have just over 500 families registered. I don't know how St. Marge's parish is going overall. I don't know their ups or downs. I know their kindergarten and preschool is booming but I also know they are bleeding out middle school students, their families dissatisfied with what's going on there. Not a big surprise to me, since I did some pre-teaching work there, and later I worked at our school and saw the difference in our math abilities. We might have had hard to pronounce names and shabby textbooks, but they weren't doing algebra by eighth grade. Anyway, that's an old grudge of mine.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem to matter as much now. I'm not on parish council anymore (sigh) but I wasn't on it when I wrote that, either. St. Marge just seems like another south side parish instead of the slick jocks or cheerleaders who keep the goth kids down.

And my neighbors? The Catholics on my block are no longer monolithic. Three families go to our church. Two go to St. Marge. An older couple goes to the Italian church nearby, mostly because they have the earliest Sunday mass around here. And the family that was worried we might not talk to them anymore never settled at St. Marge's after all--their kids go to another Catholic school further south, and that's where they've put down roots. Even my parents on the next block gave up on the Jesuits and joined our parish.

We're not the same place we were 5 years ago.