COVID-19 Policy 

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I thank God my health condition is slowly improving and secondly to thank all parishioners at St. Boniface and St. Mary’s Shaw for all your prayers and great support for me at the moment of my illness.

According to the CDC instructions, everyone in our community needs to take extra precautions not to contract the virus or pass it on to others. Face masks are required for all adults and children older than 5 years old that gather in all Catholic Churches in the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon.

However, if someone has been in contact with a COVID-positive person, he/she should be quarantined at home as required. Also anyone who has experienced flu-like symptoms should also stay home and for us who attend mass we should feel grateful with these new directions-changes and my request to you all is to truly remember to treat everyone in a Christian way in the manner to make every one feel welcomed and appreciated, without detecting or let prejudice to control us with judging who is masked or unmasked or who is vaccinated or non-vaccinated!  

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Let every one be responsible for his/her own health conditions in the sense that if you think you need to distance yourself or wear a mask or not, but I still would recommend to all of us, to keep on sanitizing our hands before and after mass.

By doing all this can help a lot to avoid putting anyone at risk. 

Thank you all for your good work & cooperation in our parish & you're always in my prayers & thoughts.

If you have any question you can reach us at the parish office 503-769-5664 St. Boniface and 503-362-6159 St. Mary in Shaw. 

Thank you and may God bless you all.

Fr. Paul Materu

Synod Preparation … … A Message from Fr. Dick 

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As you may have heard Pope Francis has called for a Synod to take place in the Fall of 2023 with a gathering of bishops from around the world.   It might seem different in what he is asking of our Church community, but he is not exactly asking for a specific topic to be discussed.   He is asking for the Church to give input about what important issues the Church thinks are important but that will not be the reason for the Synod itself.    

It seems that what our Pope is attempting to teach us, assist us with is how to approach the issues that we as a Church need to address.  So, what typically what we do when solving church issues is that we say a short prayer and then discuss the issues and after a long time there is some kind of vote taken which then is passed on to another group or to the larger Church.    What often happens within the discussion is that the person with the loudest voice, or the best logic, or the last person speaking, is the one who sort of “wins” the debate that in the future is part of our culture or becomes part of a new law.    

What our Pope is saying is that we need to change our way of making decisions.   What he would like us to do is to gather when a decision needs to be made and to pray for an hour (for example) and during that hour to mull the issue and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to us and then after that to gently and quietly express our thoughts of what we think the Holy Spirit has said to us and not argue the issue.   This has not been our process so in a sense this method might seem to us as foolish, but it will involve the Holy Spirit to assist us.    

The K of C’s invite you to a warmup for our future efforts with the Synod process by coming to an hour’s adoration on January 29 at 11:00 AM, at the same time Archbishop Sample is doing this at the Cathedral.  I hope to see you there.    

~~Fr. Dick 

We also offer weekday masses at 8:30 am Wednesday thru Friday. 

Please join us.