Dear Friends:
In an article by Luther Turmelle published in the New Haven Registeron July 13, our parish was mentioned by name as one of numerous entities to receive funding under the Payroll Protection Program authorized by Congress in response to the devastation wrought by the COVID19 crisis. The PPP, as it is referred to, is administered by the Small Business Administration, and under rules authorized by the federal government, religious entities were eligible for such loans, provided the funds were used to keep paying employees for an additional eight weeks, serving as a bridge to help such businesses get through the lockdowns that COVID19 necessitated across many states, Connecticut included.
The article in the New Haven Register rightly cited Precious Blood Parish in Milford, our parish, as one religious organization that received a loan. The amount cited, namely a sum between $350,000 and $1,000,000 was quite broad. For the record, the PPP loan we received amounted to $557,000. As the current regulations stand, if we abide by the rules (and we have done so carefully), we will either have the loan forgiven in part or in its entirety. I, for one, am grateful for this assistance offered to our parish. We are a church corporation, a parish, a religious organization, yes, but we also qualify as a “small business” eligible for such a loan. A small business under the PPP program is any business with five hundred or fewer employees. Our parish, which includes twochurches, a sizeable school and a cemetery, employs over seventy people in all. We are grateful for the good work that they do and we are happy that we were able to continue to pay them even in those lean months when churches were closed and Masses and other sacraments curtailed or suspended. With the loss of regular Sunday collections, our income dropped significantly. That being said, I will again thank so many of you for your ongoing support of the parish through those months. Many of you dropped your donations off at the rectory or in the mail, and many made their contributions online. As of this writing, while we are not where we usually are in terms of our ordinary revenue, we are nonetheless doing fairly well. That is a tribute to all of you and your ongoing generosity and support of the parish.
I must also state that none of the money loaned to us by the federal government was in any way diverted to the accounts of the Archdiocese of Hartford. Indeed, the Archdiocese has been helpful to us in its own way by subsidizing onehalf of the employee benefit costs for the months of April, May and June. That in itself made for substantial savings.
I am pleased to see that a number of people are returning to Mass, either on weekdays or on weekends. The numbers remain small. No Mass has even come close to the limit of 100 persons in all. I perfectly understand that there are a number of regular parishioners who still feel a bit uneasy about returning to church, and I hope that the trends we see taking place in Connecticut continue to do so, with dropping hospitalizations and very low infection rates. We continue to pray for an end to the pandemic and we urge everyone to exercise caution especially when in proximity to other people. The wearing of masks or facial coverings, social distancing, and careful hand hygiene will go a long way toward keeping all of us safe, and if we work together, we will get through this together.
If you have any questions about our parish and its participation in the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) of the Small Business Administration, please contact me.
Have a good week!