Old/New Staff, New/Old Staff

As part of developing a new staffing structure at St Frances of Rome and St Leonard, there was always the need to evaluate how things were working and how they could be better. In the end, the goal has always been to help the people of St Leonard be the best St Leonard they could be and the people of St Frances the best St Frances they could be. And to explore ways that we could best serve our neighborhoods by working together.

With two positions open this summer, our staffs, parish council presidents, and finance chairs have been doing a review of all the tasks that go with the various pastoral and support positions to see how we might be the best team to serve our parishes. In the process we found tasks consuming the time of pastoral staff that might be better and more efficiently handled by support staff. And we have been restructuring those tasks as Sharon Coonan, who has been the pastoral associate at St Frances, has been helping out in that position at St Leonard.

As a result I, along with those involved, have come to the conclusion that Sharon could and should serve well as pastoral associate for both our parishes. (She has previously served as pastoral associate for three parishes totaling 1500 families in Missouri.) All of our team are excited by the possibilities of this structure.

Meanwhile, we are continuing our search for a director of evangelization and formation. In the church as in the world right now, there are more openings than there are candidates. Luckily Sharon has also been a formation director before she was a pastoral associate and has been working with our parents to put together a formation program for our children and teens for the fall. We’re praying that that is a position she won’t have to help at for long.

So to make it official I’ll use the same formula the archdiocese uses for clergy assignments:

Sharon Coonan to serve as pastoral associate at St Leonard Parish while remaining pastoral associate at St Frances of Rome.

Pray that God continues to bless our service to the Gospel!

-Fr Lou