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August 31, 2008 Dear Friends in Christ,                 In a few weeks I will be publishing an end of the Fiscal Year (June 30) report on the finances of the parish and of the school.  It is important to me that all of the information that it takes to run the financial operation of our parish and our school is in your hands.  It is you who give the money to me to be used to keep the parish and school operation running in a sound fiscal manner.                 I am not going to go into too many particulars in this column but will paint a few broad brush strokes.  The parish of Saint Anthony’s is the same size as the parish of Saint Alphonsus in Maple Glen.  We both have about 1700 households.  The budgets for each parish are very similar in the neighborhood of $1.4 million a year.  Our school budget runs over $800,000 annually.  Of that amount about $300,000 comes from Saint Anthony’s because we have 90% of the children in the school and about $35,000 comes from the parish of Saint Joseph because they have about 10% of the students.  The remaining half million dollars to run the school comes from parental tuition and Home and School fundraising efforts throughout the school year.                 Of the $1.4 million that it takes to run Saint Anthony’s, $300,000 of that went to pay our mortgage with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.  You will remember that the entire rebuilding effort cost $11.5 million dollars.  We received $3.5 million from insurance and you contributed an additional $5 million (actually a little under).  So we found ourselves in the position of having to mortgage less than a third of the overall cost of our rebuilding efforts.  The $300,000 mortgage payment was comprised of $230,000 interest payment and $70,000 payment on the Principal.  We owe a little less than $3.1 million presently.                 The interest rate is a floating rate based on the Federal Reserve Funds Rate plus 2 percentage points.  Until the most recent rate cuts the Federal Rate was 5¼% which means that the parish was repaying at the rate of 7¼%.  With the lowering of the Federal Rate we will experience a lowering of our interest rate and secure some significant savings.  We have not yet received our most recent mortgage bill (paid quarterly) but the revised rate of interest is indicated on each invoice.                  Conceptually, what I struggle with the most is the amount of annual interest we are paying on our loan, almost a quarter million annually.  If we could put a dent in the principal we could lower that amount significantly.  There is nothing imminent this year but I want to give all of you a heads up about the major fundraising effort the Archdiocese is going to implement in 2009.  The overall goal of that campaign is going to be $200 million.  (In 1991 the Catholic Life 2000 campaign goal was $100 million).  The split of funds is different this time.  The parishes will receive 35% of the funds raised and the archdiocesan projects will split the other 65%.                  You will be hearing more about this next summer but this is one of those early “heads up” notifications.  There will be more financial information coming in the weeks to come. Peace, Msgr. McHenry