March 9, 2025

Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever ~

This Sunday we launch our new combined bulletin for the three communities that make up Columbia River Catholic: Holy Redeemer, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Our Lady Star of the Sea.

Instead of producing three different bulletins of roughly twenty-four combined pages, we are now producing one bulletin with roughly twelve pages. This saves our staff’s time and our resources, and improves our ability to communicate across our three communities. Now we can see in one place what is important for all of us to know as well as things that are site/community specific.

The new bulletin is also a qualitative improvement over the three previous ones, being in color, better paper quality, and better layout. That’s important for evangelization because you only get one chance at a first impression. For visitors and parishioners alike, we want everyone to know that we care about the quality of ministry here, because God and you are worth it.

We want this bulletin to be user friendly and informative as well, so we tried to structure it in a way that we think does a good job of doing those things. As you use this bulletin, you’ll notice the first few pages, including the pastor’s column, are meant for everyone in Columbia River Catholic. By the time you reach page 6, the bulletin becomes community specific beginning with Holy Redeemer, then St. Thomas on page 8, and Our Lady Star of the Sea on page 10.

A neat feature of this bulletin is that at the top of each of the community’s pages are colors that reflect a feature of the exterior of that community’s church building: cement gray for Holy Redeemer, red brick for St. Thomas Aquinas, and blue for the roof for Our Lady Star of the Sea.

Those same three colors are also reflected in Columbia River Catholic’s new logo, representing the three different communities: blue, red, gray. Our three communities are also represented in the three crosses on our logo, one of them a crucifix, making our logo explicitly Catholic. Finally, the logo has a river running through the bottom representing the one geographic feature that all three communities hold in common: the Columbia River.

A reminder: much of this is temporary. Each of our three communities will be canonically suppressed and re-established as one canonical parish in 2027/28. At that time, our logo, this bulletin, color coding in the bulletin and on our website, as well as our name, will all change in whole or in part. In the meantime, we’re doing the best we can to communicate with each other for the next three years.

If you have any ideas about how we can improve this bulletin, then click on the QR code in the bottom right-hand corner of page 5 or to the right. The QR Code will be in all future additions of the bulletin so you’ll have opportunities in the future to share ideas if you can’t think of one now.

Finally, a big thank you to Judy McMorine on our staff, who took the lead in creating both our new logo and our new bulletin. While others have helped her, especially Ted Meany and Susan Schneider, Judy has done the bulk of the work and we are so grateful for her contribution.

May Almighty God Bless You All,