Another Capital Campaign?

Another Capital Campaign?

Arrangements are underway for the diocese to identify new and larger sources of funding than the Catholic Ministries Appeal can provide.

According to Bishop Doherty, this will enable the Church to take care of the needs of the next generation and to promote the priorities “that will enable us to continue living out our faith with vibrancy and vitality,” i.e., the objectives outlined in the Uniting in Heart plan.

With this goal in mind, the diocese has arranged a feasibility study with the firm CCS Fundraising, with all pastors & some larger donors being urged to participate in long-form interviews on the idea.

Should the feasibility study turn up a positive result, the goals of the new capital campaign would be:

$28 million towards the UiH Pillar “Mission.”

  • This includes $2 million for chancery & diocesan infrastructure, and $1 million each for youth, evangelization formation & spiritual mentoring.

  • It also includes a total of $12 million for the St. Joseph Retreat Center in Tipton, to further enhance and expand the facility, and $12 million for vocation-related ministry, priest formation, etc.

$12 million towards the UiH Pillar “Witness.”

  • This includes investment in IT infrastructure, a fund to match outside grants, and some “philantropic investments.”

$40 million towards the UiH Pillar “Community.”

  • This includes educational initiatives for schools such as continuing education, infrastructure, and technology.

All told, the plan, if it goes forward, would seek to raise upwards of $80 million.

44 Replies to “Another Capital Campaign?”

    2. The diocese already has more invested in Tipton than they will ever see in a return from events. Renovations were outrageous but I’m sure necessary but it will be a continuous thing. Who does the diocese think is going to utilize the facility? With closing parishes, great decline in parishioners attending mass not to mention a massive decline in giving to the annual appeal! Since an appeal began in the diocese many years ago, I believe it was referred to as Fruitful Harvest, I have been told it was always successful. Now…with this “annual” appeal they can’t even meet their goal! Doesn’t that say something about the leadership?
      Remember the saying, “If it’s not broken don’t fix it”! So changing the diocesan appeal sure hasn’t worked had it?

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  2. After the way our parishes and priests have been treated these past two years, have we not learned anything? The chancery doesn’t care about anything but mismanaging our money. This is an abusive relationship. Why succumb to yet
    another beating? Just ignore that dumb survey.

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    1. Yes, I agree. Ignore the amateur dictators ruining our diocese and go work out your salvation in fear and trembling. They will only be an obstacle to your faith if you engage them. Drain them of money and they will flee whatever is left of the Church faster than you can say Pachamama.

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    2. My daughter who lives in a much better diocese commented that the Uniting in Heart people ripped this diocese apart, showed no compassion during the Coronatide since they barred us from the sacraments well beyond necessary, have not had a successful appeal to date, and now they want us to pony up with 80 million dollars. They must be insane. Who can argue with her?

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        1. You should be worried, but you should also be resolved to be part of the remedy. Yes, our diocesan leadership has already begun fleecing parishes and will likely initiate parish “taxes” on collections, as has been reported already on this forum. Whatever money they get will likely be squandered since their track record of mismanagement has been on display for many years now for those that care to see. So, what’s the remedy? Stop feeding the beast and direct your tithe to more worthy and accountable parts of Holy Mother Church.

          “For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
          – 1 Timothy 6:10

          St. Timothy just described our diocesan leadership. We faithful have been burdened with a gang of grief-stricken, money-obsessed, worldly individuals. All the corporate buzzword slogans of Uniting in Heart are little more than lame attempts at masking their underlying spiritual illness. For when a soul lacks supernatural faith, it inevitably latches onto the natural, and places its faith in the material and in what provides temporal comfort and security. But, like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, the soul is never filled, never satisfied, and that temporal comfort and security is always under threat. It makes for a very unfulfilled and unsettled earthly life. Why do you think our diocesan leadership is always on edge, short-tempered, petty, and vindictive? They’re terrified, all the time.

          Only by draining our local Church of money and making Her poor will these poor souls in charge have a fighting chance at repenting of their errors, heal the “many griefs” they’ve brought upon themselves and others, and become real shepherds. They may not choose this path in the end, but they’ll certainly have a greater chance of truly “encountering” our Blessed Lord in a poor Church than they’ll ever have remaining chained to the back of a ravenous, money-hungry beast.

          “Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever abandon you,” so that we confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?’”
          – Hebrews 13:5-6

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  3. Conversation with a friend of mine yesterday- who argued that the tracking tag could have existed and the Diocese not know about it. So which is worse- stupidity or maliciousness? And which is more likely? Sadly, I think maliciousness. How can I think otherwise?

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    1. It is possible they didn’t know about it, but that is very unlikely. In order to generate a unique tracking id, an explicit option to generate a unique tracking id per contact would have been selected.

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    2. While our diocesan leadership scores “High” for maliciousness and dereliction of duty, they score “Low” for intelligence and the ability to implement a long-term diabolical plan. Acolytes of Joseph Stalin they are not. From my observations they suffer first and foremost from a devastating lack of supernatural faith mixed with with self-doubt, low “people-skills”, and juvenile tempers. Because of these character deficiencies, they are extremely lazy in executing their duties because their focus is on themselves (their comforts, their material future, and their image in the minds of those with power over them).

      Now for us sheep, this is good on one hand: These are not psychotic revolutionaries who are out to deliberately destroy. Instead, they are nothing but disengaged, bumbling sycophants more concerned with social media likes than souls saved. On the other hand though, because they are disengaged, bumbling sycophants, they leave men and women of good will utterly lukewarm by presenting a version of the faith that is attractive to none. And it is in this driving away of souls by marring the beauty of Holy Mother Church with their ineptitude that their lasting legacy, and sadly eternal destiny, is being cemented.

      Pray for their conversions.

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      1. Wow! You know them all too well! Our leadership is self centered and very vain – they wouldn’t see themselves in your comments but you’ve got them pegged!

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  4. Just got and answered the survey. Will be interesting if they respond to me, considering I gladly left my name and phone number.

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    1. You didn’t have to leave your name. That survey was generated by QualtricsXM. Every link generated has tracking built into it. They know who you are whether or not you left your name and phone number. Which is very misleading, since they claim at the beginning of the survey that it is anonymous unless you choose to leave your information.

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        2. “Please know that your responses will be private unless you choose to provide your name and contact information at the end of the survey in question 10.” This statement is quite misleading, in light of what we know about the trackers built into the URL. In fact, I would have to agree with the previous comment. It is A LIE. And they wander why we’ve lost all confidence in church leaders….

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      3. Personally, I find this HIGHLY unethical.

        Imagine how many diocesan employees received that email and clicked the link and filled out the survey.

        The diocese now knows exactly which employees agree and disagree with their plans, and can take action against those employees.

        They also now have statistics about the percentages of parishioners from each parish and pastorate who agree or disagree with their plans.

        All by sending out an email with a survey that they said was anonymous, but which appears to not be anonymous.

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    1. Correct. I’ve began redirecting my tithe several months ago. They can UiH all they want, but it won’t be on my dime.

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  7. Boy, our diocesan leadership is really late to the dance on this one. They should have been hustling people and fleecing parishes years ago to try to acquire what they apparently want now. Think about it: After accepting the Caesar-imposed label of “non-essential”, closing churches, denying the faithful the sacraments, driving the marginally faithful away to the land of “TV-masses” or worse, screwing with nearly every parish through consolidations and priest-transfers, initiating the dead-on-arrival “Hearts on Fire” fundraising campaign (remember that?), they have the gall to roll out yet another fundraising campaign? Seriously, how many prayers-for-the-success-of-a-fundraising-campaign are we going to have to pray before each mass now? To say they’ve “jumped the shark” on this one is an insult to sharks. With this latest nonsense, they’ve not only jumped the shark, they’ve flown right out of the water, landed in a burning roll-away dumpster with a “Uniting in Heart” logo on the side, plunged headlong down a steep slope right off a cliff and straight into the abyss. Wile E. Coyote has nothing on these guys.

    Come, Lord Jesus.

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  8. I’m sorry. But even $100 Million dollars dumped into that dump in Tipton is not going to save it. What a monumental waste of resources.

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  10. Contracting with CCS Fundraising is unnecessary. UiH, we were told, would result in “Amazing Parishes.” Amazing Parishes, by definition, would be totally Christ-like, with parishioners more than willing to lay their wealth at the feet of the Bishop’s priests, or the feet of the Bishop himself. Can’t we just wait a little longer for UiH to produce its fruit?

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    1. I’m not sure what being “Christ-like” has to do with being AMAZING, but, without a doubt, the neatest thing about being part of an AMAZING parish is the AMAZING part. When our AMAZING parish was less-than-AMAZING, the parish council (which consists of myself, Susan, and her cousin Susan) decided it was time to make a change. So, we told the pastor, “Father, it’s time our parish was an AMAZING parish!” I forget exactly what he said in reply; Something like “What in God’s name….” or some such less-than-AMAZING response. Anyway, it sounded like “no” to us, so we called the bishop and said our pastor was rigid and divisive and probably liked the old Latin mass and BOOM: pastor gone, some elderly retired priest was installed as “administrator” (we call him Fr. Sleepy since he dozes through most parish council meetings), and our parish council was now free to make our parish an AMAZING parish. And what a difference it has made.

      From the beginning, we were totally hooked by the tagline on the AMAZING parish website: “Hey Pastor! We don’t want your money. We don’t want to be your program. We just want your parish to be AMAZING.” That did it for us, including father, who kind of snored in agreement. So, we dove deeper into their website where we found links to programs for sale that would all but guarantee that our parish would become an AMAZING parish. We bought them all, got on monthly payment plans for the monthly program updates, and now we’re AMAZING!

      Our first AMAZING parish event involved praying with candles, lots of candles. We told the five AMAZING parishioners who showed up it was because candles are “spiritual”, but it was mostly because we couldn’t pay the power bill that month because of the cost of all the programs we bought. No one complained, though. Mostly because our parishioners are AMAZING, but also because father overslept and didn’t show up and out of the five people that did show up, only two were not on parish council. And those two were wheelchair-bound, hard-of-hearing, and visually impaired. Luckily, Susan and Susan were there to hold their candles for them. They are so AMAZING!

      Anyway, I could go on and on about the AMAZING parish movement and its commitment to not wanting your money for programs by providing links to programs that cost money, but I need to go. I just looked out of our AMAZING parish office window and I think the water company is trying to turn our water off.

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          1. Yes, you may be correct there on the idea of the tax. But each parish’s Catholic Ministries Appeal goal is calculated each year on the total amount of revenue in the parish, not just tithes/ collection/donations. How much did you make in the bake sale? Did you raise money to send someone on a mission trip? Did you have a fundraising raffle for patching the roof? Are you hosting a coffee hour? All of this gets factored in to the next CMA goal because: If you can pay for these things, then you can pay more to the diocese, right? And if the parishioners don’t pledge, as we know, the money is required by the Diocese anyway. It may not be an official tax, but a rose by any other name ….

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  12. Do you know who the really smart people are? The people who do these studies. How much is THIS going to cost and how much have we already spent on such studies as well as on other companies essentially running our diocese? The bad news never ends.

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    1. Why stop at $80 million? Why not $100 million? $500 million? $1 billion?

      Seriously bishop, when you live in the land of make believe, you really need to dream bigger…

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    2. The Diocese has charged each pastorate $10k each over the last two years for consul to my fees.
      2x44x10,000=$880,000

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  13. Wow that is a lot of money. I wonder how much will go toward lawyer fees and settlements for priest abusers in our diocese? I’ve heard in the last few years that millions have already been paid. Has anything ever been published showing annual legal expenses and annual sex abuse settlement expenses for the diocese?

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    1. Insanity! Not a penny from me – or anyone I’ve talked to. The bishop needs to retire, the VG needs to move elsewhere and real leadership – holy leadership — needs to take over!

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      1. Problem is, given that the next person named comes from Rome, things aren’t looking too great in that neck-of-the-woods either. So, be careful what you wish for.

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        1. Our diocese is a backwater and the LAST place a future Bishop Jimmy Martin would want to be assigned to. Face it, our little wholesome corner of the Midwest just isn’t “fabulous” enough. No, our next bishop will either be yet another accommodating useful tool of the corrupt USCCB (like we have now) or some tradition-minded exile who somehow slipped through the cracks and got consecrated and has been banished to our diocese by the Vatican for showing signs of faithfulness. I like our odds.

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    2. I know when I was in the know, one abusive priest alone had resulted in payments of over 500k and that did not include legal fees

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