While Catholic parishioners in Questa
with the Archdiocese of Santa Fe over the future of their church building, a tiny church in Jemez Springs has won the archdiocese’s support.
Our Lady of the Assumption is a 50-family Catholic church in a village so small that “if you blink, you’ll miss it,” the local pastor, Father Gregory McCormick, says. For 12 years, villagers have been pooling the Sunday collection and whatever other money they could scare up to build a meeting hall. Last month, the church finally landed a $30,000 grant from the Chicago-based Catholic Church Extension Society—a windfall in which Santa Fe Archbishop Michael Sheehan was “instrumental,” McCormick says.
That’s a far cry from Questa, where parishioners are still struggling for access to their church building and village officials are still in deadlock with the archdiocese.
McCormick attributes the parish’s success in garnering the archbishop’s support to sticking to procedure.
“We didn’t approach the archbishop and say, ‘Guess what? We’ve built a hall and we can’t pay for it,’” McCormick says. “They detected we were honest and sincere.” And it only took 12 years.
