BRIGHTON PASTORAL PLANNING TEAM REPORT – January 2025
For many years, it has been the aim of pastoral planning in the Diocese of Rochester to maximize our local church’s efforts in carrying out our Catholic Christian mission while, at the same time, being acutely aware of the personnel and financial resources needed. In this light, and at the urging of several administrative departments of the Diocese, the four parishes primarily located in town of Brighton—Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady Queen of Peace, St. Anne and St. Thomas More—chose representatives to form a single team to begin a comprehensive planning process in the spring of 2024. We reviewed the different ministries of each parish and traced the downward trend in Mass attendance and participation. We investigated the financial situation of each site as well as its maintenance and infrastructure needs. All this gave our planning team a good understanding of some of the challenges that had to be resolved in the very near future since aging and costly buildings might have to be repurposed to support the actual needs of our current faith communities.
Given some significant demographic shifts in our 12-county diocese, the declining number of priests ordained for service in our local church, as well as the limited number of priests available to be borrowed from other local churches, it was suggested by various diocesan departments that we ought to plan for a situation where only one active parish priest will be assigned to all of Brighton. While the planning team may indeed work out projected Mass schedules to accommodate such a future eventuality, Fr. Hart has informed the team that he is not planning to retire anytime soon. Meanwhile Fr. Tyman, while hoping to step down from all administrative duties this June, has acceded to Bishop Matano’s request that he remain pastor for one more year but will receive some administrative assistance from Fr. Hart. Thereafter, he has assured the team that it can count on his ministerial services for Mass and the sacraments for some time into the future.
Bishop Matano has complimented the Brighton parishes on all the ways we have worked together to do things in common—such as our 4-parish Faith Formation program. He wants us to continue exploring ways to further that collaboration and eliminating needless duplication. Nevertheless, he advises that we not get ahead of ourselves, planning for a future that has not yet arrived. Consequently, in his view, all four parishes should continue to work together peacefully while carrying out our common God-given mission while, at the same time, joining “financial planning…to pastoral planning with an examination of existing buildings and resources needed to sustain the parishes into the future.”
In the meantime, there will be some changes. The planning team envisions that our separate weekly bulletins will soon contain at least a common page of functions and activities open to all four parishes. The team also recommends that there be more interaction and collaboration between our separate pastoral councils, generating more community building activities on each of our four campuses. Moreover, the team recommends that all four parishes become more actively involved in supporting Seton Catholic School as a common ministry of all of Catholic Brighton. Finally, the planning team suggests that the separate cluster staffs begin to meet together frequently, for the generation of ideas, for mutual support and for more effective collaboration.
Fr. Gary Tyman, Fr. Joseph Hart and the Brighton Pastoral Planning Team