My Brothers and Sisters, we need to be clear-eyed about these things. We are not immune to this kind of decline. Just look at the Archdiocese Registry statistics over the past twenty years; every category is falling, except funerals.  But we can never accept to be a Church that is dying off. We are a branch of the Apostolic Vine of the Great Church of Christ, joined through the Faith and the Person of the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Successor of the First-Called Disciple Andrew to the True Vine Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ! Even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we are alive and well, and more than well, because we are the Church of Christ, nourished by His Body and Blood, fully equipped for God’s mission of the salvation of the world.