Saint Maria Goretti’s Next Generation Parish initiative seeks to build Faith, Community and Welcoming spaces. It will enable parish growth as a beacon to draw the faithful into a greater spiritual life, it will call back those who have fallen away, and seek to draw new members into the Body of Christ. It will provide a place of encounter with Jesus Christ through the Eucharist, prayer, sacramental life, joyful witness and service to others.

If you recall, we conducted a survey of your views back in March of 2022, called the “Disciple Maker Index Survey” and 686 of you responded to the survey. We formed an Envisioning Team to develop a parish plan to include a shared vision, purpose and priorities for the next three years. We created 3 implementation teams to put in motion 3 initiatives resulting from The Survey:

Our first initiative – Building The Community:
Our Invitation Team will be seeking to build and deepen your parish life. You have seen a number of their initiatives already. This team is responsible for the personal greeting at the opening of Mass. They are responsible for the Christmas and Easter handouts. And they are responsible for the Media Ministry which will be seeking to properly communicate the activities happening here at Saint Maria Goretti. They are looking forward to growing our parish community via the spirit of invitation. In that spirit, you are invited to join us.

Our second initiative – Building The Spiritual Life:
Our Holiness Team will be seeking to expand the spiritual life of the parish. We will be exploring the abundance of Catholic Prayer, Liturgy and faith sharing opportunities, both old and new. We will be reaching out to Parishioners we have not heard from in a while and making sure that they are heard. We will seek to make a robust spiritual life an attribute that attracts people to our community, and enticing those invited to stay. We will be asking you to put your gifts of time, talent and treasure to work for our community and help grow our parish.

Our third initiative – Building The Building:
Over 90% of you told us in the Survey that our facilities are inadequate. We formed a Facilities Team to address the inadequacies. Our Facilities team’s work, to date, is currently on display in the Narthex. The team will be seeking to provide a warm welcoming space needed for our robust Catholic community to flourish. They have listened to the feedback of the Survey, they visited local faith communities to identify best practices in recent construction projects and worked diligently with The Catholic Foundation and an Architectural firm to present to you a vision for the future. In the Narthex you will see a model of the New Parish Center and related drawings. It will have a large social hall with a functional commercial kitchen and plenty of storage. It will have a large meeting room that can be connected to the social hall for large events, it will have a maintenance workshop, and it will have a youth ministry center that opens to a courtyard. Small meeting rooms for ministry activities, social activities and faith formation are provided in the design. The second floor will contain the parish offices. A basement will provide space for storing all the things we struggle to store now for Christmas, Easter and other liturgical events throughout the year. A center courtyard will contain the relocated Blessed Mother grotto. An elevator will make the building accessible to everyone. And the building is only 20 feet from the Church connected by a covered walkway.