Today I did something I’d never done before: I walked into a bank vault!
To put this in context: as part of my work here at the Archdiocese I am helping an elderly priest look after his financial affairs. As his safety deposit box keys had gone missing, we needed to go to the bank together and have the lock drilled and replaced (they won’t do it, obviously, if the owner of the box is not present). The process went very quickly — I think the paperwork took longer than the actual physical stuff.
I was contacted yesterday by a former parishioner to see if I could visit with a relative dying of cancer (she is very young, in her thirties). I made my visit today, and it was a beautiful experience.
I had a chat with Monseignor Mario Paquette, the General Secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, this afternoon. I’ve known Msgr. Paquette for several years now, and we’ve always gotten along well. He has asked me to help form a team to translate the pastoral letter on stewardship of the US bishops into a Canadian context (including into French).
I chaired a meeting of the Clergy Salary Commission this evening. We took care of some housekeeping items, such as a notification from the diocesan treasurer that we can probably look forward to a 2% salary and benefits increase. The real work, though, was the beginning of a total review of our current salary and benefits documents. To put it simply, it contains a lot of ambiguities, and I have put hours and hours into trying to tidy it up. This has not been easy, given that the official text is in French and this is not my mother tongue.
After struggling through terrible traffic I finally made it to St. David parish for a meeting to prepare for the parish Lenten mission next year, which I will be giving. The topic will be the same as the parish mission I preached last Lent at both that parish and the parish of St. Luke, except this time it will be in French!
My job of liaison to the diocesan healing ministry still continues to this day, and this evening we had a chance to be present at the parish of St. Malachy in the NDG area of Montreal. It was a very simple evening — the rosary, the mass, and the sacraments and prayers for healing afterwards — but it went really well. Fr.
I had a meeting today in Trois-Rivières of our inter-diocesan personnel group (called the “Inter-Gestion”). An “inter” is a loose organization set up on a provincial or local level to gather diocesan administrators of different dioceses to see how we can work together. There is an “inter” for the diocesan liturgy people, for example. In our case, the Inter-Gestion is mainly for those people who have a responsibility to care for the pastoral personnel of their respective dioceses.
