WCR This Week

PHOTO SUPPLIED Fr. Jan Sobkowicz and Bishop Paul Terrio, pastor and former pastor of Holy Trinity Parish, stand with a poster of the parish's mortage.

SPRUCE GROVE – A wonderful celebration and mortgage burning took place on Jan. 11 at Holy Trinity Church here. The parishioners paid off the mortgage on their church building ahead of schedule.

Bishop Paul Terrio of St. Paul, pastor of Holy Trinity from 2002 to 2012, came to celebrate with the parish.

Terrio spoke of the challenges he faced in leading parishioners to become a community and how, working with the parish finance committee, he instituted the unpopular weekly second collection, to meet the monthly mortgage payment of $20,825.

The church was dedicated in May 2002.

Zyg Slinko, building committee chairperson at the start of the project, gave a moving presentation on the coming together of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Stony Plain and St. Joseph's in Spruce Grove.

"It all started with Father Gordon Roebuck, our pastor at the time, and a talking building," he said. "Father Gordon realized the need to do something about our tired little church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

"So with his blessing, I stood at the ambo one Sunday morning to talk about the condition of the building. I had barely begun to speak when suddenly the plumbing pipes started groaning and rattling violently as if to put an exclamation point on what I was saying. There was nothing left to be said.

"Shortly thereafter, the sewers backed up at St. Joseph's Church, flooding the parish hall several times. And so the process of building a new home began in earnest."