Sept. 16, 2026

By Bob Beckstead
Watertown Daily Times

Plans are underway to move St. Peter’s Outreach Ministry, formerly St. Vincent de Paul, from its 128 Main St., Massena, location to the former Trinity Catholic School building.

Father Mark R. Reilly, pastor of St. Peter’s Parish in Massena, said the village’s zoning board approved a variance to allow them to move the operation to the school building.

“We went before the zoning board and got a zoning variance. We obtained that just last week to make use of Trinity Catholic School for the purposes of St. Peter’s Outreach,” he said.

Reilly said leadership from St. Peter’s Parish and St. Peter’s Outreach began discussions about a potential move a few months ago. They began to investigate the possibility of transferring some, most, or all of the St. Peter’s Outreach operations to the school building, which closed its doors at the end of the 2023-24 academic year.

“Lots of different moving parts to that. Here is what’s not happening — an overnight, dark of the night move and expecting the volunteers of St. Peter’s Outreach to grab your stuff and hurry up. That’s not what’s happening,” he said.

He said they had a “huge, for the most part unused building” at Trinity Catholic School, which could provide a “landing zone” for the ministry’s Christmas program.

Reilly said any move would not happen overnight.

“I’m not even certain exactly what it looks like. We’re still working those things out. We did have a number of meetings and planning and kind of thinking through what this would look like,” he said.

However, he said, some movement has already taken place.

“We are going to have to go ahead and use it for the Christmas program, and a good amount of furniture barn furniture is being stored in the front on the basement level. That’s happening now because the reality is, St. Peter’s Outreach is bursting at the seams where it is. They really don’t have any place else to go,” Reilly said.

He said they measured the square footage in the Trinity cafeteria, which is already used for Saturday table tennis games, Zumba and other occasional activities.

“The cafeteria alone at Trinity Catholic School has more square foot space than the whole thrift store, all floors of it. And that doesn’t count going up with the shelving and such,” he said.

The one issue is accessibility for those who need assistance getting up a stairway to the cafeteria.

“That is a big consideration. Right now people have to climb steps to get into the thrift store. If you want to shop throughout the thrift store, you have to climb stairs to the second floor in the thrift store. But, that would be a thing that would have to be dealt with,” he said.

Any move to the school building would happen in phases, Reilly said.

“There’s the Christmas program. There’s the thrift store. There’s the food pantry. There’s the Gabriel Project. There’s the furniture barn. There’s a lot of different aspects and moving parts to St. Peter’s Outreach, and could we envision a phase move in which one part goes at a time and settles in and we work that out,“ he said. This article is courtesy of the Watertown Daily Times/Johnson News Services. It is reprinted with permission and thanks.