As you know the Catholic Community of Meadville has been engaged in a pastoral planning process for the better part of one year. This has involved meetings with parish leaders and Pastoral and Finance councils, the selection of a task force comprised of four members from each parish, our school principal, Fr. Boyd and me.

​

This process of discernment and prayer about the future of our Catholic presence in Meadville has been a thorough inquiry into what we as a community find to be valuable and important to our identity and mission. It included a listening session open to the whole parish in December of 2019 in which we received a great volume of exceptionally useful information and suggestions. The task force collated all of the data from the listening session into a set of general goals in conformance with the stages of the planning process and submitted them to parishioners for comment, which we likewise took into consideration. In addition, members of the task force, familiar with facility structure and functionality, inventoried the facilities of all three parishes as did diocesan facilities and risk management personnel who performed their own separate assessment. Their efforts too gave us extremely useful information for the planning process.

​

So taking into consideration all of this input and after consultation with Bishop Persico the task force proposes the following preliminary plan and seeks your feedback:

​

1. All three personal parishes, St. Agatha, St. Brigid, and St. Mary of Grace, will be suppressed and in their place one new territorial parish will be created with a new name to be selected by the bishop. Ownership of all assets and liabilities of the three current parishes, including all buildings, will be transferred in full to the new parish.

2. The parish church for this new parish will be St. Agatha church.

3. The other two churches will be secondary churches without mission status. This means that while weddings, funerals, occasional services, and even some weekday Masses may be celebrated in these churches, all Sunday and Holy Day Masses will be in the one parish church.

4. The new parish will eventually need to assess the use or repurposing of various parish facilities (e.g., social halls, rectories, etc.). Until that time, these facilities will continue to function as they have been.

​

The pastoral leadership along with the task force place this proposed plan before you, the whole of the Catholic Community of Meadville, for feedback. We request that you take some time in prayer to consider it carefully and discern any ways we can improve it or outcomes we may need to take into account. In this way we can more perfectly meet the needs of and carry out the Lord’s will for the Catholic church in Meadville.

​

We request your feedback in one of two ways. The first possible way is by completing an online form on our website by going to https://feedback.catholic-meadville.org/. The second way is to submit your feedback by completing the form included with this letter, then mailing the form to the address listed below or placing your feedback in the collection basket at your desired weekend Mass.

​

When submitting feedback, we ask that you include your name, address, phone number, and email address if you have one so that we might be able to contact you if there are any further questions or if something might need to be clarified. No unsigned or anonymous feedback will be used in consideration of adjusting or amending the four points listed above.

​

If you wish to mail your feedback, please submit the feedback to:

​

Catholic Community of Meadville
ATTN: Pastoral Planning Feedback
353 Pine St
Meadville, PA 16335

​

Feedback will be accepted until November 30, 2020. No further feedback will be accepted after that date.