Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Death Announcement: the St Hyacinth Boiler is dead! Unfortunately the boiler can no longer be repaired due to its age. This means that there is no heat to the main Church. Soo I ask for everyone’s patience and to please bring a jacket to mass for the next few weeks until we are able to move forward with solving the heating problem in the Church.
“Behold the Lamb of God” is the gospel passage that John the Baptist begins todays’ passage. We know these words very well because they are a part of the Eucharistic celebration. As we enter the season of Ordinary time, we are called to delve deeper into our own relationship with the Lamb of God. As we witness the closeness of Jesus’s disciples, we are called to be close to Him as well.
One of our goals for 2021 is to increase the number of people using our electronic formats for the dissemination of information from our parish. We have our website:
Sthyaicnth.org, which is updated almost daily with information about the activities that go on in the parish. There is
Flocknotes, which is our information delivery service for the parish, in which we email and or text information about the activities of the parish. Go to
Flocknote.com/sthyhouston and join the group “Parishioners”. We are on
Facebook, go and ‘like’ our Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/StHyacinthchurch .
Next, one of the projects we have been working on for the new year is to provide livestreaming of the Masses here at St. Hyacinth. Please go to our website, our Facebook page or Viemo.com to view the current livestream mass. Be on the lookout for the 10:00 am livestream mass on our website, Face Book , YouTube, and Viemo.
Our next goal in 2021 is to increase the number of families using Faith Direct. Currently we have 191 families using Faith Direct and hopefully by the end of the year we can have at least 325 families of STHY on Faith Direct. The number of 325 families represents 20% of our parish population of registered parishioners.
However, I do want to address the approximately the over 1044 registered families here at STHY that we have no record of your giving to the Church. We do acknowledge that many are giving to the Church through the weekend collection; however, STHY needs you start moving toward electronic giving. In this way we can account for all those who are a part of the parish that are truly giving and it is an expense of the church for envelopes to be mailed to registered families. We currently spend close to $10K a year on offertory envelopes and if we could use our electronic giving, this would reduce the expense of mailed offertory envelopes dramatically.
Faith Direct is an easy and secure way to see that your offertory contributions to the church are made on a timely basis. It is an easy and wonderful way to contribute to the church. You can register in less than five minutes by logging on to www.faithdirect.net and entering our parish code of TX526 or by just simply scanning the QR code found on the poster in the Narthex. From there a few short steps will have you set up as you wish: weekly, monthly, special collections, etc. You can pay by credit card or bank draft. It’s convenient, fast and secure. Thank you for your generosity and support of STHY.
Catholics across the country are encouraged to observe a nationwide prayer for the Unborn. You’re invited to join Catholics nationwide in praying for the respect of human life. The annual 9 Days for Life novena will take place from January 21st through the 29th. marking the 48th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions legalizing abortion through nine months of pregnancy. Since those decisions, over 60 million abortions have been performed legally in the United States.
God Bless,
Fr. Reginald Samuels