About Pastoral Planning

Why Planning?

Why are we doing a Strategic Plan now?

All healthy organizations do strategic planning. It is simply a process of looking at where we are now and where we want to be in a set period of time. We choose a reasonable period to project forward, say five years, and using the knowledge of past trends, we determine what we are most likely to look like in the next five years if we stay the course; and, if we don't like what that looks like, then decide what we need to do to end up where we want to be. Strategic plans also focus on the "make it" or "break it" issues facing an organization. In our diocese, resource limitations are very clearly a strategic issue, most specifically a shortage of priests and religious. Up to now, we have dealt with the changes incrementally, resulting in reactive fixes and parishioners unprepared to understand or participate in this necessity to share priests and resources with other parishes. The purpose of this strategic plan is to proactively and comprehensively address the challenge of moving the Diocese of Richmond from a one-pastor-one-parish expectation to building a new model of church focused on inter-parish collaboration.

In the next five years, we estimate there will be 18-22 fewer active (i.e. not retired) diocesan priests to serve the 152 parishes, 23 campus ministries, hospitals, prisons and other ministries in our diocese. To further complicate the decline in clergy, the Catholic population in our diocese is increasing while the number of priests is decreasing. This trend of decreasing priests is going to become a more rapid decline as many priests in our diocese reach retirement age in the next five years.