Weekly Letter from the Pastor

Dear Fellow Parishioners of St. Benedict:

I wish to extend sincere “thank you” to the Knights of Columbus for sponsoring the Fish Fry last week. These type of events are good both for community building and have the added benefit of bringing some revenue to the school. Thanks for all who attended and made the evening a success.

As last year was sixty years since the founding of the parish, we did some research – thanks to the investigatory work of Margaret Roddy – into the sacramental history of the church. As we keep on hearing about demographic shifts and people leaving the church, etc., I thought it interesting to do a comparison of data over the decades. As I have not yet presented a spiritual report to the parish during my time here, this was something I wanted to do. So, for your information, the following:

We compared sacramental records for 1959, 1969, 1989, 1999, 2014, and 2019.

                                          1959     1969     1989     1999     2014     2019
Baptisms                          73         196       120         98         56          89
First Communions          0           332       151         151      147        117
Confirmations                  0           0           153         125       122        102
Weddings                         4            28         44           18          7            16
Funerals                           3            29         49           44          64          79

A few comments on the above. The reason for no Confirmation in the first two years reporting would be that it was not typical at the time for a parish to have Confirmation every year, but rather every two or three years. Only the Bishop was permitted to confer the Sacrament, hence parishes got less frequent visits. This is still true in some smaller parishes.

While the number of funerals does reflect the change in demographics over time, we also report them differently now than we did then. Included in this total are both Funeral Masses and Funerals Outside of Mass. Not all of the funerals recorded for 2019 were parishioners.

On a side note, in 2019 we celebrated the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick to 281 individuals. This includes those at Bay Shore Hospital, Bay Shore Health Care Center, the Willows, Anchor Care, private homes, the parish grounds, and for parishioners in other health care facilities. Not all of these are parishioners, but everyone at the specified facilities is under our spiritual care as they are in our boundaries.

Each November I am required to report these numbers to the Bishop. Our parish shows a certain stability. Certainly there are a few outlier years, but a review of birth rates, economic concerns,etc., would account for that.

The number of new families moving into the area and registering here continues to grow – some twenty over the past two weeks – so that the overall health of the parish looks good from this perspective.

I hope you find this interesting and informative.

Have a blessed week.
Father Garry