RANDOM THOUGHTS 8 20 20

Dear Parishioners and Friends of St. Francis Parish,

Mryon Markowski’s sister in law, Mary Ann, died this week and so did Fr. George’s mom in the Philippines. Due to the virus and lockdown in the Philippines, Fr. George will be unable to attend the funeral. Let us keep them in our prayers.

The other day I went to the bank to get some quarters. Homeless people need everything, and they desperately need quarters to do laundry. Every week I get about four rolls. Not this week just go one roll. That’s the first time I heard about the coin shortage. In today’s Hartford courant there is a great article about the coin shortage, which caught me completely off guard. Money is not circulating as it usually does, thus coins are staying home in our coin jars.

We need a Pro Life Representative. If you are interested, please let me or Patrick McKenna, our Parish Council president know. We can even have a committee.

Wednesday, 100 years ago, the 19th amendment was finally ratified by Congress, letting women vote. But, as you can probably guess, things didn’t go all that well in many places. There was a good special on TY last night showing the uphill fight, especially for black women, to actually vote. It also showed footage of a 6-year-old black girl entering an all-white grammar school. Chaos ensued. All the white parents took their 500 kids home and used a lot of bad words. What a sad sight. And all this happened not that long ago.

Yesterday I drove to Norwich to drop off our ACA envelopes. Rained pretty hard for about 20 minutes. Msgr Tony, pastor the St. Patrick Cathedral told me about all the damage done to the church and other buildings due to a powerful lightning strike some three weeks ago.  Damage over 100 grands. So many systems got KO’d. Msgr Tony is 81 and still going strong. What an amazing priest.

Have two more funerals coming up, Friday evening and Monday morning. Really nice people.

The tag sale seems to be going great. A lot of big items have been bought and we are helping get them home and also picking up more stuff. I like this kind of thing. People working together and we actually make some money for the church. The raffle tickets seem to be selling pretty well. We have over $2,500 for the Sister Gloria fund. Halfway there.

Some more photo bombs.