Under The Umbrella

As the summer finally grinds down, I find myself wondering and worrying about the arrival of the El Niño season that the meteorologists are predicting, hoping that our roofs, some of which are in need of repair, hold together and none of us gets washed away down the new bike lanes on Arden Way. I’m planning to buy a new umbrella just in case. We will, I’m sure, slog through the winter together just as we sweated through the summer. 

Each year I take this occasion of our annual financial report to thank you all for your ongoing and most generous support for our parish, our ministries, our school, and our neighbors. This year, in addition to this acknowledgement, I’d like to underscore the two complementary features of our financial makeup here in this parish: our operational and our charitable activities. 

In the bulletin each month, we report on the money the parish receives and spends on its everyday work. Each spring we create an operating budget built on an optimistic but realistic projections of both our needs and reasonable expectations for the coming fiscal year. Our “ordinary” operating income includes offertory collections, unrestricted gifts designated for greatest needs, and support from and for parish ministries and programs. Our operating income pays for staff salaries, utilities, insurance, building and grounds maintenance, and our ministries and programs. We are pleased to report that, for the 2025-26 fiscal year for the second year in a row, our operating income was significantly greater than operating expenses. This has also allowed us to rebuild our savings as an umbrella against the inevitable storms that are in sight or just beyond the horizon. 

We also track what we call “non-operating” funds—money donated for specific purposes rather than day-to-day parish expenses, including gifts we pass directly to charitable causes and contributions to help pay down construction debt on our school and parish offices. In addition to debt paydown, you generously make gifts to the Annual Catholic Appeal, to St. Vincent de Paul and other charities that pass through the parish and out into the community, to our diocesan special collections, to Fr. Jack Donald’s Honduras appeal and some large infrastructure projects like the parking lot resurfacing, new HVAC and surge suppression systems in the Parish Center, and other unforseen facilities improvements. Thanks to our parishioners’ generosity, income in this category also exceeded expenses, even with unexpected demands during the year. Taken together, the parish finished the year with more income than expenses both in the operational and non-operational categories, a welcome change from the red ink we saw a few years ago. This has allowed us to continue to rebuild our savings umbrella against the inevitable storms that are in sight or just beyond the horizon. 

On pages four and five, this report provides, with some text and user-friendly charts and graphics, a financial summary of where we’ve been this past year, and what income we are projecting to raise and what we intend to spend on our operating expenses in the coming year. On page six, you’ll find a summary of the charitable outreach you have very generously provided to our diocese, our neighbors, and our sister parish of San Ignacio in Honduras, all of which reflect an extraordinary outpouring of help that amounts to 60 percent above and beyond our annual operating expenses. 

We will weather the storms together, brothers and sisters, and we can do so because, as I said last year, we are all in the boat together, albeit on uncertain and stormy seas. I ask for your continuing support for our community’s ministries of worship and service. Your generosity is the sheltering umbrella under which I stand with you, grateful for your goodness and inspired by your open hearts and open hands