Dear Parishioners,

The progress on the rebuilding of our campus took a couple big steps during these past few weeks. Looking at the rectory, the new garage addition, and the newly built maintenance building, just seeing these buildings take shape has been a visible reminder of our progress. But now as we enter these final weeks of October, you won’t be able to see as much progress as the building work moves indoors. Keep checking our photo layout each week in the Narthex for the weekly progress. I know that some of you are excited to see the new layout of the rectory and I promise that we will have an open house when the contractors have finished, and the City of Portage gives us the ok to occupy the rectory once again. We are getting closer, but now we must wait (isn’t this like a little kid waiting for Christmas?).

As one can imagine, there needs to be a lot of planning and meetings to make sure that we don’t forget about anything as the rectory takes shape. If you were watching some of the special videos and talks by your priests during our pandemic broadcasts, we occasionally broadcasted from the chapel in the rectory. That was one of the rooms that took a direct hit when the roof peeled off that room. We had to strip this room, and most of the upstairs rooms back to the walls and ceilings. Since it was our desire to reuse this space as a chapel for our priests to pray, I was able to receive permission from Bishop Lohse to once again use this space as a chapel and reserve the Holy Eucharist at the rectory for the priests to have a sacred space to pray. The chapel may have a slightly different look this time around, but I am very pleased that this will still be available for our priests to begin and end the day in prayer.

Next Sunday, please join us for our Parish Fall Fest. Admission is free and this will be held in the Stanley Centre Gym. Come and enjoy some donuts and other treats and activities from 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM. I hope to see you there. For additional information about this, please see the article in today’s bulletin. 

Fr. Mark