Fiddling while Rome burns

I've written about the Little Italy parish before. This was the place whose hot-shot, do-nothing pastor made a big announcement about cutting a Sunday Mass and limiting Confession time because of a lack of attendees. This parish is back in the news for dedicating yet another hand-carved, $10,000 wooden statue, this time to St. Michael, the patron saint of police. The cops were just trying to keep up with the firemen, since they had gotten their own $10,000 statue of St. Florian the previous year.

Good Lord! $10,000 for a statue???  In the first place, that is a ridiculous price. How true is the old saying that a fool and his money are soon parted. Salesmen of magic beans will be flocking to Rosebank in droves now. You can find many similar looking statues on the internet for much lower than that, and the artist who made these is definitely no Michelangelo. The mass produced stuff looks even better. In these hard economic times, when we just had multiple Catholic schools close down on Staten Island, these statues are an insult.

Second, although this effort was headed by a layman, John Sollazzo, it was initiated by the pastor of the parish. This is his priority?? Artistic frivolities? What a silly waste of time and money. If this priest were a leader, he'd tell his flock to spend their time evangelizing. Then he'd tell them to spend their money helping deserving Catholic kids go to the parish's high-priced elementary school. So many of our pastors seemed to have missed their calling as ham comedians or interior decorators. What an embarrassment.