In his chancery office, director of diocesan planning Thomas Papandrew shows the progress of diocesan planning with a timeline on Feb. 8.

Bishop’s strategic planning process moves forward

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Bishop Larry Silva’s most ambitious endeavor to date — the diocesan strategic planning process — is plowing forward pretty much on schedule, according to the man he specially hired to direct it.

Armed with thick three-ring binders and a large chart filled with of circles, lines and rectangles, Thomas Papandrew spent about an hour with the Hawaii Catholic Herald on Feb. 8 explaining what he is doing.

In his office next door to the bishop’s, the low-key planner explained the game plan, whose promise, according to the bishop’s vision, is first to provide each parish with “a Gospel inspired, enthusiastic and skilled pastor” and “trained pastoral and administrative support,” and to give each island resident “access to a welcoming parish.”

It begins by sifting for directions at the grassroot parish level, he said.

That means visiting each parish, brainstorming with parishioners and parish leaders, pouring over records and data, and distilling all that information into a blueprint for the future.

Accompanied by vicar general Father Marc R. Alexander, whom the bishop named to lead the process, Papandrew has already visited Kauai’s five parishes, the dozen parishes of leeward Oahu, and a number of Big Island churches. The pair is about a third of the way through the state’s 66 parishes, 27 missions and 30-plus parish schools.

Here’s how the process works.

Upon visiting a parish, equipped with Bishop Silva’s vision statement and the data from half a dozen previous reports and studies as a jumping off point, Papandrew and Father Alexander engage local leaders in a dialogue on “where they think the issues and focus ought to be today.”

Papandrew said the topics range from spiritual issues, religious education, Catholic schools and adult formation to outreach efforts and parish facilities.

“It sort of runs the whole gamut,” he said.

Papandrew leads the meeting while Father Alexander works a laptop computer taking notes which are projected on a screen for all to see to ensure their accuracy.

The planner and the vicar general then present their findings to a core planning committee, a group of hand-picked specialists who meet every two weeks.

Besides Papandrew and Father Alexander, the group’s members are Sharon Chiarucci, head of the Welcoming Parish Office; Carmen Himenes, superintendent of Catholic Schools; Jayne Mondoy, director of the diocesan Department of Religious Education; Colleen Sathre, a retired University of Hawaii academic planner and Papandrew’s fellow parishioner at Sacred Hearts Church, Punahou; and Jim Bell, a past chairman of Papandrew’s former architectural planning firm of Belt Collins.

The planning committee analyzes the raw material of all the parishes within a vicariate, and boils it down into a brief vicariate report with a few solid recommendations.

Papandrew and Father Alexander then bring the report back to the vicariate to see if the planners got it right.

The Kauai vicariate

The only vicariate to have gotten to this point so far is Kauai.

The entire Kauai draft report came to seven pages, including two pages of statistics, a page of “needs” and three short term draft “recommended actions” expressed in 25 words or less, and two long-term draft recommendations of less than 50 words each.

“We’ve been attempting to keep this very focused,” Papandrew said.

At the Kauai vicariate meeting on Jan. 31, Papandrew asked the parish representatives to “validate the findings.”

According to Papandrew, they agreed with the short term — one to three years — recommendations which called for separate youth and young adult programs, an educational mentoring program for priests and lay leaders, and a parish building maintenance manual and training program.

But the parish leaders “took issue” with the planning committee’s long-term — three to 10 years — priorities, he said.

They felt that recommendation #1, establishing a new north shore parish, was less a priority than recommendation #2, to “assess the existing Kauai Catholic school needs and existing facilities.”

Two of the Garden Isle’s four parish elementary schools closed in the 1980s, but the facilities remain. One of the former campuses housed a Catholic high school from 1997 until 2001, when it closed because of low enrollment.

“They’ve asked us to examine the resources to see if we are making the best use of the [school] facilities that we currently have,” he said, or “should we work to get Catholic schools back” in these places.

Wanted: Leeward high school

Another Catholic school issue surfaced in meetings with leeward Oahu parishes, the planners second targeted vicariate.

“Just about every parish has said they think there needs to be a high school in the leeward area,” Papandrew said.

Financial realities have sobered up the discussion, however.

“I’ve got to tell you, the tenor of the conversation shifts quite a bit when you inform everybody how much it’s going to cost — $100 million,” he said. “And that’s just the buildings.”

The idea of a leeward Oahu Catholic high school is at least as old as 1992, when it was a top recommendation of a Hawaii’s Catholic Schools master plan, and as current as a few years ago when it was being openly discussed as a possibility by at least one existing private Hawaii Catholic high school and also a leeward parish.

“We’ve been having this internal discussion within the core planning group,” he said, on whether $100 million, if it were available, would be better spent improving religious education for public school students, adult faith formation classes, or new educational technology.

But those are decisions that will be made further down toward the end of this planning process.

“We are still in the fact finding phase of this. We are trying not to get ahead of ourselves,” Papandrew said. “We are trying to stick to the process and get input from all the parishes first.”

He hopes all the parish meetings will be done by mid-May.

“We visited about 24 parishes so far and probably have another 30 scheduled for the next two, two and a half months,” he said.

After leeward Oahu, the diocesan planners will move on to west Hawaii, then Maui, east Hawaii, west Honolulu, and finally windward Oahu and east Honolulu.

“And then we will take a look at the whole thing and try to understand what’s the commonality that is running through the entire state,” he said.

What will emerge, he said, will be recommendations for the diocese, for each vicariate and for individual parishes.

In addition to gathering parish data, the planning group also hopes to glean information from a dozen or so state-wide focus groups — small selected samplings of the population questioned for their opinions on a particular topic.

A focus group they very much want to organize is one for “non-practicing Catholics,” Papandrew said, to “get some feedback” on why they are “choosing not to practice their faith.”

“We are struggling with how we put that thing together,” he said, because of the difficulty in getting people who have lost interest in the faith to talk about it.

Other focus groups would concentrate on youth ministry, Catholic schools and religious education.

Gospel-inspired, skilled pastors

While Papandrew and Father Alexander poll parish leadership for their needs, the bishop’s vision statement seeks first to enhance the parish leadership itself.

“My vision for the future is that every parish will have a Gospel-inspired, enthusiastic, and skilled pastor,” Bishop Silva lists as his top desired outcome.

His second is: “Every parish community will have trained pastoral and administrative support.”

To the first point, Papandrew said, “the bishop is naming someone to be a full-time vocations director and is placing a greater emphasis on going out proactively to solicit vocations.”

Point number two, he said, “deals with both the clergy as well as the lay leaders and deals with the issue of not just their talents to be organized and run the place, but spiritual formation as well.”

“The need that we are seeing is the continuing education and continuing formation of both our pastoral leadership as well as our lay leadership,” he said.

But while parish leaders may lack adequate training and education, Papandrew said, most are “sincere and good.”

“I think that we are finding, for the most part, most of these parishes do have really sincere and good pastors,” he said. “They are stretched too thin, but the happy news is that they really have really good people leading the charge and they all have really good committed lay members willing to step forward and get involved in any number of things.”

“There are one or two parishes — and we know which ones they are — that need some help,” he said, “but I think if you are to look at it generally, most are doing fairly well.”

Emerging action items

After all the parish meetings and vicariate reports, the planners will draft a final plan for the scrutiny of the bishop, the vicariates, the parishes, the Presbyteral Council and the Diocesan Pastoral Council.

“We are going to have to have a session were we put all this out on the table and say, ‘Here are the findings,’ and try to find the common threads,” he said.

The final strategic plan will be completed by December of this year.

But already some action items are emerging.

Besides a new parish on Kauai’s north shore, Papandrew sees new churches in leeward Oahu, and “probably Kona” and “probably the area from Kihei to Lahaina.”

What also is needed is a program to maintain already existing parish facilities.

“I think we just need to have better guidance and more professional help to help these parishes with how to put together a maintenance program not unlike one for a condominium,” he said. “I live in a condominium and we have a 20-year plan. Parishes typically don’t have those kinds of things in place.”

But in the end, don’t expect a laundry list of to-do items. There won’t be a lot, Papandrew said, for practical reasons.

“We want to keep the number of recommendations in the end to something that we can actually do,” he said.

Implementation is key, he said. The final plan will include the steps for implementation, the people responsible for the implementation, and an “accountability mechanism to make sure that these things are being carried out.”

It will also include a time frame. And a plan to pay for everything.

“Of course, we have talked to the bishop about an annual appeal or some kind of bishop’s fund,” Papandrew said, “because none of these things are going to occur without the resources to pay for them.”