It Was My Fault
A few weeks ago, someone walked into the Sacristy and asked to speak to me. As we spoke, I learned that they had suffered the loss of a loved one and wanted to have a funeral on a specific date and time. I felt so sorry for the person standing before me that I broke a cardinal rule and did not check the Church calendar before agreeing to the funeral. What a mistake that was! Unbeknownst to me, there was already a rather large event scheduled in the Church for that exact date and time. This event involved over 200 families and it had to be canceled. We wracked our brains trying to find another venue, but sadly there was none. So for one grieving family in need, I inconvenienced 200 other families. The whole mess was completely my fault and the people in our Religious Education Office have been taking a lot of grief for it. Please don't yell at Annie and Lisa. It was my fault.

I mention all of this because I want you to know that on our website, stpaulkensington.org, there is a complete schedule of events for the School, the Religious Education Program and the Church. We have no secret meetings at St. Paul. If there is a meeting going on, it will be on the calendar. I know that I for one will be checking the calendar much more carefully, and I encourage everyone to do so. Before you call the office for a meeting or appointment, why not make it a practice of going to the parish web page to find out what is going on?

Some of our senior citizens mentioned that they don't have a computer and that they don't want to get one (makes a lot of sense to me). To help them know what is going on in the parish, we have expanded our Mass intention calendar to include the complete schedule of events in the parish. Every week, everything that is happening here at St. Paul is listed on that calendar. I know that we used to do monthly calendars. The problem with them was simply that so many meetings get canceled or rescheduled here that those monthly calendars were out of date the day they were printed. Thank you for your patience and a word to the wise: “Check the Calendar.” I learned the hard way. Once again, sorry for any and all inconvenience.

Projects on Hold
Some of you may have noticed that a number of projects around the property have kind of stopped., for example, the women's bathroom in the basement of the Church. The reason for this is simple. Our maintenance crew has simply been very busy shoveling snow. In the last couple of weeks they have shoveled the roof of the gym twice. They are forever widening the paths on our sidewalk. Today (Tuesday), it was icy in the morning, so they were busy throwing salt on all the sidewalks. We have a lot of sidewalks. If you notice that we are not making a whole lot of progress on some projects, rest assured that as soon as we get all of this snow cleaned up, we will be back on task.

In The Hospital ?
Your friars go to HCC (New Britain General Hospital) about 2 or 3 times a week. When we arrive, the hospital gives us a list of St. Paul Parishioners, and we go to every room. If you do not identify yourself as a parishioner of St. Paul Church when you register in the hospital, we have no way of knowing that you are there. In fact, there have been times when we probably walked right by your room. We want to visit you, we want to anoint you and pray with you. That's why we visit the hospital so often. If you or a loved one from the parish is in the hospital, please, please, please identify yourself as a St. Paul Parishioner, or call the Parish Center to make sure we know that you or your loved one is there. Sometimes people call us and say I was in the hospital but no one came to see me. I am so sad when I hear this. I know when you or a loved one is in the hospital, there are lots of things going on and lots of confusion in your life, but if you want to be anointed or visited, please make sure that we know you are in the hospital.
God Bless! Fr. Robert