Finishing up a week of pastoral visitation at Corpus Christi

This will be one big post regarding the parish visitation at Corpus Christi parish (see this blog post explaining the visitation). Last Saturday I moved my office to the parish, and moved in to the rectory. I’ve been on-site now for a week, meeting with parishioners, parish groups, and members of the broader community.

In case you were wondering, here is what the schedule of this pastoral visitation looked like:

• Visit the organizers of Suitcases for Africa.
• Visit the catechists for children’s catechism.
• Visit the local college (John Abbott).
• Visit the mayor of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
• Meet the kids of the First Communion class.
• Visit the mayor of Senneville.
• Mass at the Sainte-Anne veteran hospital.
• Meet with the churchwardens (finance council).
• Mass at a senior’s residence (Maxwell).
• Christmas lunch with the parish staff.
• Visit the mayor of Baie-d’Urfé.
• Meet with the choir.
• Meet with the pastoral council.
• Meet with the social justice committee.
• Meet with the parish youth.
• Meet with the kids of the Confirmation class.

There were also private meetings with some parishioners, as well as the usual load of work (phone calls, email, etc.). While this may sound like a lot (and it was), I was a bit disappointed that some meetings didn’t pan out (e.g. with the local schools), and I just didn’t think to set up some other meetings (e.g. with the local university campus, with community service and charity groups, with pastors of other Christian churches or leaders of non-Christian religious bodies, and with the neighbouring Catholic parishes). I’d also like to include a more liturgical component in the future — not just weekend mass, but daily mass, confessions, anointing of the sick, etc. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.

My next step regarding the visitation will be to prepare a report for the parish, possibly in the form of a Powerpoint presentation, so that I can reflect back to the community what I observed. It will then be for the community to address the issues raised. For the long term, I’d also like to create a “how-to” document from this experience, so that we’d have a written procedure on setting up and conducting a pastoral visitation.

I must say, this pastoral visitation has been a blessed experience for me. I hope is has been for the parish as well. I already have another one scheduled for January, and possibly a couple more in the spring. Given there are 30 parishes on the books that are designated as “English”, if I do 6 pastoral visitations a year I should be able to get through all of them in 5 years (which is the usual canonical standard). I’m looking forward to it.

This post is dated Sunday, December 11th, 2011 and is filed under Scenes of ministry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.