July 17, 2022

Dear St. Martin of Tours Parishioners and Friends,

We have the All Things New data for St. Martin of Tours. I’ve been having difficulty downloading some of the data (it’s a formatting problem), but since I wanted to get this to you soon, I decided to do what I could, which meant taking photos of my computer screen on three of the metrics that I thought were the most important and clearest to understand. I apologize for the fuzzy quality, but I hope you can still read the graphs.

So it looks like our parish faith has three strong suits: We believe the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ (88%), we agree that we have an awesome parish (91%), and most of you would recommend me as a pastor (89%). Father asks himself, “What can I do for the 12% who either don’t have a strong belief about the Eucharist, or else who lack the faith that Jesus is truly and really present?”

With respect to how often we go to Mass or prayer, 91% who responded attend Mass at least weekly (Note: be advised, the sample of respondents is skewed toward regular-Mass goers!) About three quarters of us pray daily, and a big over half are faithful to some particular Catholic devotion, such as Rosary or Adoration. These seem like good numbers, we really need to get to 100% on weekly Mass attendance and daily prayer!

The one area where we hit bottom is we aren’t sharing our individual conversion stories and faith journeys. As you can see, that one showed up twice! Should we start Faith Sharing Nights at SMT?

Let me know! - FRNW