Talking To Your Parish or Diocese Office

[TheLittleLady]

Many times I answer questions “call your parish office” or “contact your Diocese”. As I answered another question this way, I began to consider, why are these resources not tapped?

I could understand if the questions were “I’ve asked at my parish and at the Diocese, they do not have an answer, so does anyone here know blah blah blah?”

If you have a really tiny parish with no office, no secretary, no DRE, your Diocese still has a website and a staff to help the faithful with all sorts of things.

Perhaps it would help those parish/diocese staff who are on these forums to know the reasons why they are not the first place to go for answers.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I think many times people who have been away from the Church, or have been going to church at least sometimes but aren’t very familiar with the parish office, don’t really know what a parish or diocese office can help them with, and what they can’t.

Often people are shy and don’t want to risk calling the wrong person or the wrong office and being brushed off or sent to someone else.

Also when it is something sensitive like an annulment, there seems to be a big fear of doing something wrong and getting reprimanded.

In my experience, there is also a wide variety of people staffing parish offices. Some of them are extremely kind and helpful; some of them are only kind and helpful if they know you or if you’re a big contributor to the church; and some of them just aren’t good at their jobs and you figure they are working there because they “know somebody” or because they had some bad personal situation where the pastor gave them a job for reasons other than their ability.

At the diocesan level, the websites are often very difficult for me to find what I’m looking for, and I spend a lot of time on the web. Some of the diocesan websites seem to be set up in a way that discourages contact. I don’t know if that’s “on purpose” or not but I have seen commercial businesses do that - hide the contact numbers on some obscure page - when they don’t want everybody to be calling them up. Some of them use an “email contact form” where you fill it out and hit “send” and the right person might or might not call you back. Usually, just the description of people’s positions on the Diocesan website makes it completely unclear who you want to call unless you are an expert on how dioceses run and who does what.

None of these issues are confined to just parishes and dioceses. They happen pretty much everyplace you have a nonprofit organization with a website. There just isn’t the motivation to make an awesome website because you’re not seeking to draw in customers that you will otherwise lose to your competitor with a better website. And there sometimes isn’t a “customer service” mindset in the parish or diocesan offices either.

 

[0Scarlett_nidiyilii]

Are you talking about question of faith and morals? Or administrative stuff?

 

[TheLittleLady]

Both, either, simple things like “where can I buy a crucifix” to “I think my house is haunted” and everything in between.

How can we, as parish staff, become more of a resource for our parishioners?

For instance, my HUGE pet peeve is when a restaurant, let alone a parish, does not take the 60 seconds needed to update their website/facebook page for when the business is open or for a parish for mass/confession times.

Because I know that is an issue, I update the phone recording, the website, the facebook page as well as the print bulletin with times for Holy Day masses or if we are closed for an ice storm.

What other practical things ought I, and the others on here who work for the Church, be doing to be of service?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I think you’re doing a great thing right there with the Mass/ Confession times.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have to play “hunt the wumpus” on parish pages to simply find what time is Mass. I generally will find the parish via MassTimes app, then go to the parish website to confirm the Mass time because sometimes MassTimes is out of date or doesn’t take some special summer schedule into account (many parishes in my area have some Masses eliminated during summer months). I always look for the current Bulletin rather than on the webpage because the webpage often is not updated or does not take into account some special circumstance for the particular month or week.

In my opinion the Mass time and confession time are the most important parts of the website, yet they are often buried in small print under 50 other things like pictures of happy parishioners at a picnic, inspirational columns from the pastor, and advertisements for 10 different groups for prayer, AA, etc meeting during the week. I just don’t get this.

 

[Xystus]

perhaps some people are more comfortable asking questions when they have the anonymity of the internet.