Preferential option

In our pastor's October 15th homily, he mentioned the remaining debt from the parish capital campaign of a few years ago. While he said he assumed that will continue to be something for which many parishioners will be paying, if someone came in and paid it off he'd name the parking lot after them.

That same day there was an insert in the bulletin a flyer available after Mass.

The people in Shay-co-eel [fo-net-ik] attend Mass at the church in Santa Apolonia [Guatemala] but during the week they hold prayer services and religion classes in several different homes.

As you can see in this earlier post. They call their "sub-parish" Sagrada Familia, Holy Family. The insert goes on

They are dreaming of building a church they can call their own.

Not a new parish, but a chapel.

The bishop of the area has approved their plans; they just have to come up with the money. That is where we come in...it will cost $35,000. You read right...$35,000.

To put that in perspective, from the last figures I saw, it's roughly equivalent to one month's payment on St. Al's debt from the building project.

We know several people who offered to pay for it completely but we want the community to be a part of this endeavor.

This leaves me with the impression that if someone offered to pay off the parish mortgage and pay to build this chapel in rural Guatemala, the parish would accept the money for the mortgage and honor the donor with naming rights, but reject it for the chapel as a matter of principle.

Update: A reader reminds me that not everything that winds up in my copy of the bulletin was in it when the usher handed it to me, and I've changed the post accordingly.