Sister parishes unite congregations

Bette McKown didn’t know Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ellicott City had a sister parish in Baltimore until parishioners were invited more than a dozen years ago to celebrate an event with St. Veronica in Cherry Hill.

“I went and fell in love with the place,” McKown remembered. “They had a very wonderful priest at the time, Father Steve (Father Stephen O. Ositimehin), and had a joyous worship service.”

Over time, McKown and other parishioners traveled to Baltimore for a variety of events, provided lunches for St. Veronica’s summer camp program and helped with the parish’s sunscreen drive. Musicians from both parishes performed together.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help and St. Veronica also had a successful Lenten prayer program that began Ash Wednesday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and ended with brunch at St. Veronica.

“Some wonderful things happened,” McKown said. “It allowed us to be more aware of each other. You got to know the parish.”

According to Julie St. Croix, director of the Office of Parish Renewal within the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Institute for Evangelization, 62 parishes participate in the archdiocese’s sister parish program. The idea is to create “a multi-level active connection between two parishes to see themselves as one,” she said.

Relationships often begin because parish priests are friends or former classmates, St. Croix said, and typically involve parishes with very different demographics.

“The goal is to amplify the relationships and build them so they become more robust and form relationships between leadership and parishioners at both parishes,” she said.

Sustaining those relationships can be challenging, parishioners said, and the nature of some partnerships has changed over time.

Today, McKown said, the relationship between Our Lady of Perpetual Help and St. Veronica is focused more on financial support for the Cherry Hill parish.

‘I love the people there’

Church picnics, fall festivals, peace walks and choir performances have brought members of St. John the Evangelist in Columbia and St. Bernardine in West Baltimore together over the last few years, according to Evelyne Mbandi, a parishioner of St. John. 

“One of the things we did that was very successful was the prayer program,” Mbandi said. “We had 27 participants from each parish.”

Monsignor Richard Bozzelli, pastor of St. Bernardine, noted that members of the sister parish in Howard County also participated in St. Bernardine’s Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Walk in January. Since the Seek the City to Come parish reorganization, which brought together four parishes at St. Bernardine, the parish now has several sister parishes, Monsignor Bozzelli said. While relationships are still being built, the financial support from St. John and the other sister parishes is important to keep parish outreach programs strong, he said.

“We’re talking thousands of dollars,” Monsignor Bozzelli said. “Our poor box income for last fiscal year was $91,000. A lot of that was from our sister parishes.”

The key to developing a successful sister parish relationship, according to McKown, is to have a dedicated lay person take the lead, and priests who are committed to the relationship.

“The priests need to say, ‘We really want to do this,’” McKown said. “That doesn’t mean they do the work.”

A committee of volunteers “is a great help,” St. Croix said.

“That spreads it out,” St. Croix said of the work. “That’s how relationships last.”

D. Scott Miller, director of communications for St. John, said the parish is “taking a step back” to allow the parishioners at St. Bernardine “get to know themselves” since the merger.

“We have a good history,” Miller said. “We are a very multicultural parish. This program helps connect our parish to the wider rainbow.”

“There’s a lot to learn from St. Bernardine,” Mbandi said. “(We are) getting to know each other through worshiping together and praying together. We will see how we can continue building our relationship.”

McKown, too, hopes Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s sister relationship continues.

“It is a very good thing,” McKown said. “I love St. Veronica. I love going up there. I love the people there.”

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