Dear parishioners, 

 

On behalf of our Parish Leadership Team, I am happy to present to you the annual report for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The Parish Leadership Team, led by the Pastor, consists of two lay Parish Corporators, Finance Committee, and Pastoral Council.  In studying the pie charts for the past fiscal year, you will see the economic hard times had a big bearing on our offertory program. With also the many repair and maintenance needs of the facilities, we ended the past fiscal year in the red with about $24,000. This could have been much worse if it were not because of the generosity of all of you in supporting the parish as well as our strategic and conservative spendings. We engaged parishioners who volunteered hundreds of hours, both in caring for the buildings as well as the campus grounds. During the past fiscal year, the parish also operated for the most part without a maintenance position. Had that position been filled, the parish would not have been able to end where we did. The message to all of us is that it takes a village to keep a parish running. 

 

I also want to let you know that this past year the Archdiocese of Baltimore initiated a facilities audit of the parish through Bureau Veritas, an engineering firm. The last time such a detailed facilities audit happened was about 7 years ago. This audit gave us a road map on items that we need to immediately attend to, and those that we need to begin planning for that will need work in the near future. This made me to reactivate our Facilities Committee to come up with plans for our buildings repair plan. To meet some of those dire needs, we will be working with the archdiocese in the future to launch a capital campaign so that we can secure and properly maintain our facilities.   

 

I am happy to report that our offertory for this fiscal year, is on a good trend and we hope more families will be able to support our initiatives through Fall Stewardship program. Our Online Giving/Offertory EFT donations were up from the last year as more people are now utilizing Give Central our online giving platform. 

If you are not already using Give Central, we encourage you to sign up with the St. Patrick Give Central by using this links below or on our parish website: https://www.stpatrickhdg.com/about-5-7 https://www.givecentral.org/location/1240. As you can see in our budget of this year we hope to considerably increase our income base to meet the rising cost and ever-growing needs for repairs and maintenance on our ageing buildings. 

 

We successfully completed the renovation of the convent and transforming it into a rectory, and also had a wonderful 175th Anniversary celebration. Our weekly bulletin, flock notes, and website all reflect a parish that is fully alive, not only in offering so many ministries to our parishioners, but also in helping those in need, both locally and internationally. 

 

If you have any questions, please reach out to me or to Mr. Bert Deluigi our Finance Committee Chair or to Kathy Meneghini our bookkeeper and also Joanna Friedenberg our Office/Business Manager. I look forward to a vibrant fiscal year 2023-2024. 

 

I would like to conclude by thanking so much the Finance Committee members and our business offices (office manager and the bookkeeper) for working on producing this report, and for their great vision and stewardship of our parish. 

 

Thanks again for your generosity.  

 

Fr. Francis