May 2015

 

Brother Knights,

 

We are coming up to the end of our Fraternal Year and are in the process of accepting nominations for officer positions for next year. The first round was at our April meeting and the final round and elections will be at our May meeting on May 27. I encourage every member to consider becoming an officer with our council. Most of the officer positions require very little time commitment.

 

Remember, the more active members we have the less each of us will have to do. So, please continue to promote the Knights of Columbus to men of our parish who are not yet Knights. When asked why men haven’t joined the Knights many say it was because they were never asked. Let’s make sure that we ask (at least once) every potential Knight in our parish.

 

I attended the Ontario State Convention the last weekend of April and found it very informative and worthwhile. There were a number of important items discussed and I will update everyone on these at our May General Meeting but there is one I would like to bring to your attention. It has to do with finances. There are a number of initiatives that are handled by Ontario State and these all cost money. With State, as with all councils, it has become increasingly difficult to raise money for the charitable work we would like to do. If we can’t raise the funds then we must look at ways to more effectively use what we do have. One of the ways is for councils to provide email addresses for all members so that newsletters could be sent out electronically rather than mailed. It is hard to believe but if all correspondence could be sent via email State would save $100,000/year. We have emails for less than half of our members. So, as I have done since taking on the role of Grand Knight, I ask that all members with email addresses to provide them so that we can reduce our costs and be able to use that money for the many charitable causes we support.

 

I would like to thank all officers and all members who have helped with various Knights sponsored events this past year. With member support, our St. Patrick’s evening was a huge success. Our breakfasts continue to raise money for our council even though we only ask for a free will donation for it (some councils can’t believe that we are able to make money this way, but we do). Our State lottery ticket sales are also going better that last year.  To all our brother Knights who serve our parish on the various ministries and those who help our council in any way I would like to thank you. We have a great group of Catholic men who have done so much for our council and parish.

 

I would like to thank our Deputy Grand Knight, Brother Jeff Foster, for putting together these newsletters, setting up both a web site and Facebook account to keep us all informed of what is going on in our council and parish community.

 

Finally, a very special thank you to our Chaplain and Pastor, Fr. John Comiskey, for his support of our work over the past number of years.  We hate to see you go and we wish you all the best as you take on your new role with the Diocese of London.

 

This will be the last newsletter for the fraternal year so, in closing,  I wish everyone of you and your families a holy and safe summer.

Vivat Jesus

Tom