ST. EUGENE PARISH ADVISORY COUNCIL
Minutes from Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Meeting attended by: Fr. Joseph, Fr. Ryan, Geri E., John E., Gene Z., Agnes D., Carol O., Gisella M., Joe H., Miguel V., Vanessa F., Gloria S., William S., Dan S., Steve S., Ruth V., Justin L.; Felix C., John N., Sam F.
Opening prayer led by Fr. Joseph
Minutes from the August 17, 2011 meeting were approved
Youth Ministry – Reyna M./Felix C./Justin L.
The youth have been busy lately!! Since the last meeting, TYM had its open house and 3 meetings. There were about 12 or 13 kids at open house and the same amount has attended the meetings. We selected a T-Shirt designed by Kaitlin Tarnaski and Kristine. It is a white shirt with splatter paint on it. It has a dove on the front with Saint Eugene TYM written on it also. On the back it says: God has no phone but he’s my number one contact. God has no Facebook but he’s my best friend. God has no Twitter but I follow him. #sainteugenetym. However, not many showed up to help at the Food Festival. Roughly about 3 or 4 helped with the games, which was what we were assigned to do.
The Hispanic youth group had their car wash on 7/23 and it was very successful. They raffled off for free two backpacks with school supplies (one for boys and one for girls) as a way to express their thanks to the community for their active participation in this event. They also donated $100 towards the new hymnals.
Fr. Joseph indicated that he visited the Hispanic and Anglo youth group meetings last week and noticed only a handful of attendees. He asked for the leaders of these groups to monitor attendance and try to find ways to increase their numbers.
Felix C. mentioned that they had already discussed this and noticed their attendance decline coincided with the start of classes. It is understandable since they meet on Monday nights and their groups 17 and younger mostly are non-drivers also, their young adult group works late sometimes. Therefore, they are looking to changing their meeting dates to Sundays after 1pm mass.
Steering Committee John N./Sam F.
Had meetings on 9/6/11 & 9/20/11. Next meeting is scheduled for 10/4/11.
The contractor is still optimistic about getting the church ready by Christmas. We’re now using the offertory and loan funds to pay for the construction costs.
The steeple should go up in place within the next day or two.
The sheetrock is almost complete. It should be all done by this Friday.
The brick pavers should be started Mon/Tue of next week. This job will take approximately 3 weeks to be completed.
The pews should be in place by 12/15/11 to allow time for the inspector to come in and fix anything he may find so that we still have time to be ready with the new church by Christmas.
Everything is going well. Parishioners have stepped up to pay for accessories so we are able to get all items we initially wanted in the design of the church.
Once the steeple is in place, the slab of concrete that’s currently under it will be moved and the covered walkway connecting the current church building to the new church can be started.
Joe H. suggested a fundraiser whereby parishioners can sponsor individual pavers. However, the timeframe for this project is just 3 weeks till completion and also Fr. Joseph wants to keep parishioners focused on their weekly offertory rather than distract them with other fundraisers that might take away from their weekly contributions.
Liturgy & Spirituality – Geri E.
** October 9, 2011 from 2:30pm to 4:30pm-MANDATORY workshop for all Liturgical Ministers and Parish Leaders.
This workshop is being led by Gerard Hall the Diocesan Director of Divine Worship who will present the revisions to the New Roman Missal.
** Our Advent Series and Lenten Series will focus on the Holy Eucharist and the New Roman Missal.
** October 15, 2011 9am-5pm, Catholic Convocation 2011 to be held at Cardinal Gibbons High School. The focus will be to learn more about the Catholic Church, its teachings and practices. For more information call 919-645-4447 or visit the Diocesan web site at wwwdioceseofraleigh.org
** November 8, 2011 our Liturgical meeting will be a planning session for the Liturgical Chairpersons to familiarize themselves with the floor plan of the new church.
** December 4 and 11, 2011 will be training sessions for all Liturgical Ministers for any changes that may have to implemented to our normal procedures.
** Our next meeting is October 11, 2011 at 7:30pm
Religious Education/Faith Formation – Dan S.
> Safe environment training with Mary Castleberry went well and was attended by many catechist.
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> Catechist meeting was well attended and plans for the new year underway.
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> First day of classes went well.
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> Held first parent meeting at church on the 25th.
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> This year there are two Confirmation classes to finish the two year program of 8th and 9th grade. There is a new 9th grade pre-Confirmation class that will start the new two year program of 9th and 10th grade Confirmation.
There will be a Confirmation class in the church with parents when it is time for the students to consider sponsors.
There will be an adult religious education program starting on Tuesday nights on October 11 with Trish and Father Joseph. The theme will be Biblical References of the New Roman Missal. This class will count towards catechist certification.
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> Walk for Human Need will be Oct. 2nd and sponsor forms were distributed in classes.
Family Life – Steve S./Bruce T.
Couples for Christ - Bill and Gloria are not only facilitators but also recruiters for the Couples for Christ group. This is a group dedicated to encouraging the growth of couples together in their faith. There are over 1 million members of this group around the world. There are several offspring groups attached to it such as Kids for Christ, Youth for Christ, Singles for Christ, Handmaids of the Lord, etc. This last group consists of ladies who for one reason or another have become single. There are 60 families involved in Couples for Christ in the Diocese of Raleigh. St. Eugene has 4 couples and 2 handmaids of the Lord.
Second Friday Seniors Meetings-Their last meeting was on 9/2/11. The attendees were Sue and John B., Edna C., Ed C., Lin C., Agnes D., Elena E., Adrienne F., Elba P., Christie S., Dot S., Evelyn S., Pat and Bruce T.
Bruce opened the meeting at 10:15am with a prayer. Chris S. passed around our roster to be updated and a sign-up sheet for refreshment dates for the next year’s schedule.
We will be changing our group’s name back to First Friday Seniors due to scheduling issues.
Our June 10, 2011 beach trip was enjoyed by all. We are planning to go to the beach next June 7, 2012.
Schedule of Meetings/Activities 2011-2012:
Oct. 7-Friday CD/DVD Prisoner of War: Survival
Nov. 4-Thanksgiving Meal with priests: Bring canned foods for Catholic Outreach. They have had a $90,000 budget cut.
Dec. 13-Christmas Gathering at Lin C.’s
Dec. 2-Regular Meeting
Jan. 6-Trip to Greek Orthodox Church- to ask Fr. Ryan for input.
Feb. 3-Jewish Temple on Creedmore Rd. – Sue & John B.
Mar. 2-Irish Lunch @ John Mitricska / Mar. 28-Avila Lent Retreat
Apr. 6-Good Friday
Apr. 13-Duke Gardens – Lin C.
May 4-Fr. John’s Birthday Celebration
May 10-Billy Graham Bus Trip-will open to all seniors than to St. Joseph Golden Agers
Jun. 7-Beach Trip to Wilmington Oceanic @ 703 S. Lumena. Phone: 910-256-5551
Meeting closed with special prayers for Agnes and Lin’s daughters.
Submitted by Patricia Tarnaski.
Parish Community Spirit – John E.
- Refreshments were canceled due to the various sales of items associated with the Church and IF&MF programs.
- Minimal amount of Church kitchen supplies were replenished.
- Retained the Community Spirit expenditures below budget level.
- Will review the Church kitchen and Community Spirit supplies end of September for replenishment.
- Established and scheduled Raffle Ticket Sales Committee to sell tickets after all Masses and during the festival.
- Community Spirit will oversee the new committee headed by Cindy W. related to Sunday Socials at the parish hall. This program is tentatively scheduled to start the first weekend in January 2012.
Buildings & Grounds – Ricardo M./Sam F.
This committee will need to grow and expand once the new church is in place. Grounds will need to be kept during the Spring/Summer.
Education of all parishioners about the use of facilities needs to happen in order to maintain the new and the existing buildings.
Fr. Joseph is exploring the possibility of hiring a part-time janitor/maintenance/repair person in lieu of having the existing small cleaning and landscaping contracts the parish has (John E. suggested we look at the contracts to make sure there wouldn’t be a problem cancelling them). Inquiries will be made and cost analysis is in process.
Gail is now gathering rental/usage contracts and policies from other parishes around the Diocese as to their use of their parish/community halls. St. Eugene needs to set up its own policies and procedures prior to start using the parish hall come next January. Gene stressed the need to give priority to the use of the hall to parishioners and parish groups such as the TYM over any other activities. The use of alcohol will be prohibited for any activities that may be undergo at the hall. Even so, careful study needs to be made prior to renting our facilities that may bring about issues of disorderly conduct in church property.
Evangelization – Beth A.
Prayer Blanket Ministry Workshop is on Saturday Oct 1. Mass at 8:30 AM, then moving to the education building for various workshops on knitting, crocheting, fleece blanket making, making rosaries, and stuffing the envelopes that go with the prayer blankets, A wonderful group of ladies will be sharing their skills. At this date there are 62 persons registered to attend. This does include over half of this number from the Hispanic community in the parish. Multiple requests have been made to also have a group that meets during the evening or on the weekend for those that work. We will look into this further in 1QTR of 2012.
Evangelization Committee - met in September. Disciples on the Journey participation has decreased in the last few years, so we are looking into possibly a different program. Something will take place during Lent.
RCIA - looks like 2 catechumen's and 6 candidates so far for this year. We are in the 2nd week of classes so far, and are using the Catechism for Adults for the format.
Safe Environment – Mary Kathryn P./Joe H.
Thanks to Mary Castleberry, we trained 12 people on Sunday, August 27th. But for Hurricane Irene being in town, I believe we would have had even better attendance. We hope to have all of our reference calls completed within the next 30 days.
Food Festival – Gene Z.
They will have their wrap up meeting on Mon. Oct. 17. For now just a big thanks to all present for their participation and help during the Festival and its process. Gene’s heard very good things from everyone involved and has even heard people coming up with ideas for next year’s Festival which is very encouraging. He believes all food booths sold out. Given the weather though not as many drinks were sold.
The Silent Auction will be held at the Harvest Festival and depending on the outcome, this may be the way the auction will be done from now on.
Social Ministry – Ruth/Agnes D.
Had a Social Ministry Meeting Aug. 30 with all the different Ministries giving updates.
Brown Bag doing very well. They are up to 510 sandwiches, 700 by mid October and hope to be up to 1000 sandwiches by the new year. They are working with other area churches and collaborating with their ministries.
Community garden doing well as they continue to share their produce with the Food Pantry at the United Methodist Church as well as with our parishioners. They have started offering family garden plots (10’ X 10’)for $10 a year. They will be having their jams and jellies sale after masses in November as one of their fund raisers. Fall planting has started.
Migrant Ministries in the process of organizing the Migrant Good-bye Mass in October.
During October or November the Rotary Club wants to meet with Social Ministry and see about having their kids come over to our parish and participate in the different ministries we have so they can get some community service hours in.
Prayer Blanket Ministries doing very well. They are having a workshop Saturday October 1 here in the Ed Building for anyone who wants to learn how to crochet, knit or help sew prayer blankets.
They will attend the Deanery’s meeting for Social Ministries in the Diocese.
We finalized our preparation for the Food and Music Festival. We helped with set up and decorating and manning the Welcome tables at the festival.
The Parish Social Ministry Training workshop is Saturday October 1, 3 people so far are going. It will be in Newton Grove.
CPO lost 2 grants – one of which was for $90,000. They will have cards out as fundraisers during this holiday season, as they did last year. They don’t turn people away even though they don’t have as much food to distribute.
Preparing for the Walk For Human Need Sunday October 2 at 2:30 pm. Made sure it was in the bulletin. Many thanks to Gail for getting things prepared and that the Religious Ed classes received their pledge sheets. The Ladies Guild and Knights are set to help with the water tables. Meeting Tuesday Sept, 27 in the Ed Building to prepare the trail signs for Saturday.
Next meeting in January.
Stewardship – Joe H.
Thanks to the help of the stalwarts on our Breakfast Brunch committee, we had a successful Welcoming Brunch for new parishioners on September 11. Turn out by new parishioners was light but those that came were very interested in our activities and were encouraged to volunteer.
Annual Ministry Fair - Stewardship weekend is October 15-16. Gail is putting our Liturgical and Social Committee volunteer opportunities in the bulletin next weekend for people to ponder.
I am going to try a different approach to getting volunteers this year but my idea will require some thought and a little effort from parish council chairs. I plan to ask parishioners to consider giving just an incremental amount of time to a particular committee, e.g., one hour per month for the next 12 months, one Saturday during the spring of 2012, four hours in March, etc. The idea is that many parishioners are afraid to commit to be on a committee but are willing to give a bit of time during the year. If we can get them involved, if only minimally, perhaps we can incite them to become more involved. At the same time committee chairs can get help on projects and tasks that may be simple but time consuming. Maybe you need a few hours of work on a website, or phone calls made, or some other limited task. This is where your work and thought come in. If somebody signs up to help, you will need to find SOME WAY they can help and become involved. If people sign up and are ignored, they will not sign up again (we’ve seen this with the Food Festival). Avoid the temptation to say “It’s easier to just do it myself.” If you get a person involved chances are you can call on them again to lighten your load. Think of those areas where you can use such help and then be prepared on stewardship weekend to sign people up and describe to them what you need.
I will also need some volunteers to stand up at each Mass and be introduced briefly with a description of their committee. I do not intend to have, for example, somebody from the Festival at each Mass. I’d like to have about 3 different committee chairs per Mass as “examples” to talk about. When people leave Mass, however, I would like every committee to be represented outside by somebody. This is your chance to get some help. Use it.
Will this work? I don’t know. I do know that despite our best efforts in the past the old adage that “20% of the people do 80% of the work” still seems to be the case. A large part of the problem seems to be that many parishioners consider that they can’t simply volunteer to help on a limited basis. Let’s try and bring them in incrementally. Ultimately we’d like to see every committee chair have a fairly large “database” of volunteers to call on to help on a periodic basis when they are most needed.
Hispanic Ministry – Yolanda G./Miguel V./Gisella M.
The last meeting took place on Thu. 9/9/11. The topics of discussion were:
2. New Church Directory – Registration will begin 9/11 for families to sign up for time slots for the new church directory. 8”x10” and picture packages will be available for families to purchase if they wish to.
3. Religious Education Program – not much was discussed on this topic
4. Walk for Human Need – scheduled for 10/2/11 after the 1pm mass.
5. Multi Quinceanera – Registration is now closed
6. Wedding on the day of Guadalupe – Registration is now closed. Only 2 couples signed up for this program. Fr. Ryan however is preparing another 18 couples who wish to marry but not necessarily on this day.
7. Hispanic Heritage Mass – Will take place on 10/8 at St. Thomas More in Chapel Hill. 12 spaces have already been reserved. The bus trip was canceled and we are now asking people to carpool.
8. Other topics – Fr. Fernando Melendez from Seven Springs joined us for half of our meeting to talk about the new pilot program the Diocese has and how they are trying the program throughout some of the churches that have agreed to be part of this pilot program. It consists of several new methods of teaching how to better serve our church and trying to get the Hispanic community more involved with the church. It was decided that St. Eugene will not be part of the pilot program.
9. A Volleyball game is being organized among the different Hispanic ministries for 10/9/11 after the 1pm mass to promote camaraderie.
Knights of Columbus – Steve A.
The Knights of Columbus Council held an Ice Cream Social during all Anglo and Spanish Masses during the weekend of August 20th & 21st judging by all the smiles from both the Young and young at heart the event was a big success.
The Knights Manned the CPO truck during all the masses during the weekend of September 11th and 12th helping in collecting 3100 pounds of Food and 542 dollars in collections.
The Knights manned then All American booth during the 9th Annual Food and Music festival held 17 September Even though the weather was not the best a good time was had by all Brother Knights who manned the Booth.
The Knights will be leading the Rosary during all masses during the Month of October.
Ladies’ Guild – Cindy W.
The Ladies Guild held is first meeting of the 2011-12 year Sept. 7, 2011. We have planned to do a Halloween Carnival/Tricky Trunk for Oct 30 at 7pm in the upper part of the church parking lot(paved area only). We need groups to set up and run games. We will furnish the prizes. Both TYM groups are encouraged to help for community service hours. We could also use help from any other groups that would like to help. Any groups that wish to help can contact me at 919-816-5308 or email at cindywalshnc@gmail.com.
This Sunday we will help with the Walk for Human Need. Our next meeting is Oct 5, 2011.
The Ladies’ Guild donated $6,500 towards the new church’s cabinets.
Finance Council – Carol O.
The Finance Council met on September 13, 2011. Issues discussed at the meeting were as follows:
Tracking capital costs
Maintenance of the buildings and grounds
Procedure for ordering supplies
Job descriptions for all parish staff
Next meeting October 11, 2011
They will go over 30 applications for the part-time accounting position Carlos A. left behind when he moved at their next meeting. Bob Mancuso is heading this committee. The committee and Fr. Joseph will interview the top 3 candidates and make a decision then.
Pro-Life – Danny R.
Danny and Aurora went to the Diocesan meeting entitled Respect for Life.
They weren’t present at the PAC meeting tonight to discuss outcome of the meeting.
Wendell Council of Churches - Fr. Joseph
-Annual Prayer Service will take place on 11/20/11 at 7pm at the New Hope Baptist Church. Our choirs were invited to participate and the event will be published on the bulletin. People are asked to bring a canned food item for the Methodist church’s food pantry.
-Ecumenical Martin Luther King Jr. Morning Prayer Service is scheduled for January 3, 2012 which will be hosted by St. Eugene at our new church (hopefully). There will be some coffee and other refreshments offered after the service.
Vocations Committee – Daniel S.
1) We received information about our new seminarian, His address and birthday are listed below:
The address of Brother Michel Bineen Mukad is "Fraternidad San Antonio",
PO Box 25177, San Juan - Puerto Rico 00928-5177. His Birthday is October 28, 1982.
(Thank you Fr. Ryan)
2) We established communication with Chris Johnson who is currently on retreat for his new vocation. He has copied the committee on a wonderful note he sent to Father Joseph regarding his commitment and status.
(Thank you Cindy Lake)
3) We currently have a quantity of Vocation cards being printed up for distribution in the near future.
(Thank you Steve Allen)
4) We discussed this years registration for the Catholic Convocation Seminar at
CG High School, but believed it was a bit late to distribute to the parish to register.
5) We discussed the 3rd annual "Ignited by Truth" walk-a-thon. No report on participation.
6) Lastly, I am stepping down as the chair person for the committee. Graciously, Cindy Lake has agreed to step into the position. Father Joseph has committed his full support of the change as he has for me in the past.
Administration – Fr. Joseph/Staff – No report submitted
October 4, 2011 is the Feast of St. Francis which we will celebrate during the weekend of October 8 & 9. After each mass that weekend Fr. Joseph will lead a procession to the Community Garden for the blessing of the statue of St. Francis and prayers. Pets will be blessed at 4:30pm on Sunday 10/9/11.
Fr. John will come and celebrate some of the masses that weekend as well and he has asked St. Eugene’s cooperation with his parish’s raffle tickets ($5 a piece).
Deacon Willie celebrated his 75th birthday with the parish’s staff. He’s a devoted and charitable man much admired for his quiet good deeds and strength in the face of adversity.
Fr. Ryan asked chairpersons to let him know a good day for him to stop by their meetings and take committee pictures for the parish’s directory and website.
Gene suggested Fr. Ryan recruited the help of a TYM member who is computer savvy to help him with the parish’s website maintenance. He will look into it taking into account any safe environment issues that may pose a constraint.
Fr. Joseph shared with all PAC members a leaflet the Diocese of Raleigh has published regarding child protection and safe environment issues. He said that if anyone needed any more of these to ask Gail to order them from the Diocese.
New General Topics – John E.
Cindy was not present at the meeting to discuss her progress regarding the Sunday Socials for the new parísh hall. John E. will ask her to prepare a report for the PAC
’s next meeting.
Closing prayer led by Fr. Ryan
**Next Council Meeting to be held on Wed., October 19th, 2011 at 7pm.
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