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May 2, 2024Dear friends in Christ,
The parish and community once again united to celebrate our families, our friendship and our faith at our 39th annual Spring Festival last weekend. Suffice to say we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our hundreds of parishioner volunteers who made the event a great success. My thanks to all the booth workers, food servers, auction helpers, game attendants, flea market and sweet shop workers, Knights of Columbus, Ladies Auxiliary, CtR School students and faculty, Youth Ministry, the Piecemakers, and everyone else. It was a superb job by all. And, of course, a great big thank you to all of you who came out to support us during the weekend. The weather was overcast and breezy, but fortunately not sweltering hot, and we dodged the rain until about the final 30 minutes, so that was a blessing.
We had a steady stream of people throughout the weekend, and our second year of holding it on the back parking lot was again met by much enthusiasm. It truly seems that the abundant space we have in the back serves the Festival well, allowing us to spread out to a great extent and improving our “human traffic flow” while keeping us safely away from the “car traffic flow” racing down Huffmeister. Using the Parish Hall for not only Bingo but also Silent Auction and the big kitchen for our food booths are great pluses, too.
Everyone contributes to the festival's success, whether you bought raffle tickets, priced items in the flea market, poured Cokes, baked a cake, worked a shift in a booth, or rode. The list goes on and on. Everyone is part of it, and everyone contributes to its success. That’s stewardship in action, so thank you, one and all!
I send my special thanks to Bob Suarez, our general chairperson for the second year, who worked tirelessly to bring everything together. He’ll be the first to tell you that all of his helpers and various chairpersons deserve the credit, and they do, but it takes someone like Bob to weave it together. Thank you for your tireless work on behalf of our community, Bob, not only Festival weekend, but in the months leading up to it. Thank you as well to his wife, Kim Suarez, who put together a terrific array of live auction items. They make a great team and we are blessed to have them at CtR!
Megan Dillingham, our Director of Advancement, deserves special thanks, too, for her work in overseeing all the details on a day-to-day basis. Her attention to the many details and a sincere desire to cast a wide-net among for involvement of our parishioners, was a great gift to us. Megan and I, along with Bob, met regularly in the months leading up to the Festival, and the hours and heart they and their many volunteers put into the preparation enabled us to enjoy one of our best-ever coordinated Festivals with very few hiccups along the way. Oh, there were a few, but nothing major, and all of our advance planning really paid off in the long run.
My gratitude as well to Angela Borges, our assistant in Advancement, for her good work alongside Megan, and to Carrie Taylor, our Director of Communication, who helped us spread the word and partnered with Megan to create the “look and feel” of the Festival. If you saw the pre-Festival video of Bob and myself, or me with the kids from the school, that was all Carrie’s creativity. Kudos as well to David Prieto, Omar Cerna, Jose Moreno, and Wilber Soto of our Facilities staff who all put in extra-long hours over the weekend. They were rock stars before, during, and after the Festival.
As always, the Food Booths were some of the most popular areas of the Festival. As I say every year, if you went hungry, it was your own fault! Please join me in thanking our barbecue team who smoked up delicious brisket sandwiches and sausage. Special thanks to all our food booths: Vietnamese, Cajun, Mexican, African, Pizza, and of course our Knights of Columbus with the traditional hot dogs, fries, and the always popular funnel cakes.
There were so many who contributed so much time and talent over the weekend to make the Festival a great success, but at the risk of omitting some, let me especially acknowledge and thank the following: Ken Aubry, Gilda Bartz, Gary Boudreaux, Stacie Bradley, Pat Broadway, Diana and Ed Crosson, Harry Conte, Dan Daues, Melanie Gehrt, Rene Gomez, Lynn Gondesen, Marcelo and Suzanne Gutierrez, Donna Heath, Justin Hirtzel, Pat and Marie Kelly, Diane Kitchens, Carol and Wayne Longer, Ismael Morales, Audrey Morton, Steve Owens, Ed Questell, Amanda Rangel, and Jenny and John Tyler. There are hundreds of more names of volunteers I could list, but please know of my deep gratitude to God for you and your service to our community.
Special thanks to Angie Wells for again overseeing a terrific Flea Market all week. Angie and her team always do an amazing job, but this year was something else. The people of CtR really outdid themselves in donating and buying so much … stuff! There were bargains galore whichever way you turned. If you stood still long enough, Cecilia Gomez, Caroline Champness, or one of the many other volunteers in the Community Center were liable to slap a price tag on you and sell you to the next person through the door!
Thanks as always to Dan Block, our masterful DJ and auctioneer, who again came home to CtR from Louisville to help us get the bids up, up, and up! Likewise, thanks to Briz Garcia, our Auction MC who kept it moving, and, of course, to all of our generous bidders.
We’ll report back in a few weeks with some final thoughts on the festival after we close the books and review our notes. We’ve already been talking about how we can adjust a few things here and there to make it more efficient and we welcome your comments and feedback as well as we continuously strive to refine our efforts to serve our community. For now, let us give thanks to God for the blessing of the weekend and all who made it possible.
In other news, the calendar has turned to May and that’s always a busy month for us at CtR. This week we celebrate the first of two masses of Confirmation for our high school students on Thursday, May 9 (the second will be the following week on Thursday May 16). Also, next Saturday, May 11, our 2nd-grade students will make their First Holy Communion with two masses scheduled at 8:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. We congratulate both our teens and young children on this milestone in their respective faith lives. I offer special thanks to our wonderful catechists and teachers who have helped prepare the teens and the children to receive both of these sacramental graces. Please note there will be no confession next Saturday, May 11, due to the First Communion masses.
Peace, Fr. Sean