Letter From Fr. Scott
June 11- July 31, 2015
Greetings in Joy of the Risen Lord!
Another year has gone by and we continue to grow as a faith community. This year we have more than 1000 persons that in one way or another have made a commitment to the task of evangelization. Each from their own mission, some with youth, some in the soup kitchen, other in helping married couples and yet others sharing the experience of prayer. Parish life becomes crazier as each day goes by. I was walking with a couple through our parish center in construction on a Saturday night… in one area a group of youth is Eucharist adoration, in another area another group is at play… than another group in preparing for another talk… a youth choir is practicing in the back ground… as scenes from a movie a simultaneous collages of experiences are being lived out before one´s eyes.
We continue to build on our center. We are working on the fourth floor and will have a total of six including the roof area that we will use as a terrace. Each floor on this first part of the project has some 2200 square feet. I have got more into the action as we have spent most of our funds. We have the steel to continue and the community has been helping with the concrete. All the employees of the church now take turns working on construction. I myself have become the responsible of onsite supervision and concrete mixing since we have to make the concrete to support with a certain resistance and then send it to a laboratory to be checked. It may not be the most priestliest activity yet it is better than a golf course or going to a gym and the Good Lord knows that it keeps you in shape. I must confess I actually enjoy it too. I make 12 square metric meters for the columns of each floor. We are now at 50 feet heading for close to 90 feet on the first half of our construction or as we call it, the North Tower. This may sound bizarre to some, but given that land is extraordinary expensive going up was our only option. Doing nothing I did not considerable a viable option. Each floor completely finished costs us some 30,000 dollars. The most expensive single part of the building will be the elevator.
In this month of June we have 700 confirmations and another 700 some first communions, baptisms continue to rise, last year there were 1360. Mass attendance continues to hold between 9000 and 10,000 we hope to push that up to 12,000 this coming year. Our security in general in our part of the metro area has improved and with it attendance to our 10:30 p.m. liturgy on Sundays. We are now at an average of 300.
In our scholarship program we will have 5 new students in high school (here it costs around a 1000 dollars a year per student including transportation). I am very happy because a family that with your help I have been assisting since the mother died and the father is chemical dependent, the oldest will be entering high school this fall. Her two brothers are excellent students too. I will have a total of 13 in high school and 8 in College. I got the University of Nuevo Leon to help me with the school fees of several of them. Education is part of our soup kitchen program since in the end we hope it will feed even more. In the meantime it keeps me as a pastor physically present in the high school where that will have 7000 students this year and on the University Campus.
We are on youth encounter number 26 for the year and have 10 more to go. Thirty to fifty youth come to each encounter that we now have in the first two floors of our center. They last from Friday nights to Sunday night. They close with the Sunday evening 8:15 p.m. mass. We also have had some 17 marriage encounters too to compliment the youth encounters. We now have 13 youth groups and 11 couples groups that organize the “Encuentros”. They usually have pre and post encounters, so it gets a little wild sometimes, translated into plane English, I do not always know everything thing that is going on in my own parish. When they ask me I say “I just work here I am not the owner”.
Fr. Scott
Pd… Few pictures of our project…