News

Planner off to Oshkosh

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

When Tom Donovan leaves diocesan work this week to become a parish business administrator, it will be the first time since 1975 that he has actually lived and worked in the same city.

Donovan, the diocesan parish planning director since 2003, will become business administrator for the parishes of St. Jude and Most Blessed Sacrament in Oshkosh on July 2. The two parishes will officially be formed July 14 from six Oshkosh parishes: St. Mary, St. Josaphat and St. Peter (Most Blessed Sacrament) and St. Vincent, St. John and Sacred Heart (St. Jude).

This arrangement of two parishes with two pastors - Fr. Tom Reynebeau and Fr. Jim Jugenheimer - and two parish and finance councils, but sharing a central staff of a business administrator and two coordinators of religious education, is unique in the diocese. Donovan says this model of a central staff with separate parish staffs is part of the future envisioned by the diocesan parish planning process.

Working on that planning process was one of Donovan's jobs at the diocese.

"I have the unique advantage," he said, "of having a diocesan perspective and going back into the parish. I hope to be able to take the skills I've learned at the diocese and apply them to the parishes and develop this model."

The parish planning process will begin a new planning phase in 2009 that Donovan had hoped to take part in. "I did it once before and I felt I knew what it was all about," he said.

But he decided he couldn't resist the possibilities offered in the new position at Oshkosh.

At the diocese, he was also the parish stewardship contact and coordinated diocesan respect life efforts.

He said he will miss the diocesan staff - many of whom he counts as friends - and the interaction he's had with parishes around the diocese.

"When I'm out in the parishes," he said, "I'm dealing with people who are there because they want to be there; they are dedicated, caring people."

He's seen many of those people over the years in a job that entailed traveling most of the 10,700+ square miles of the diocese. When Donovan came to the diocese after retiring as the education director of the Green Bay Correctional Institute in 2003, he bought a new vehicle. He has since put 135,000 miles on the odometer. He said his wife, Maureen, asked if his new job meant he'd be home more evenings. That made him chuckle, since most parish meetings take place in the evenings.

Donovan, who completed the diocesan commissioned ministry program in the business administration track in 2004, is completing his third two-year term as trustee at St. Raphael Parish in Oshkosh. He said that background will help him in planning for the future of the two Oshkosh parishes, which currently have six church buildings.