The Catholic Church has been around a long time which is why it can speak authoritatively about the human condition and at the same time be bogged down by all those foibles. It’s also why so many dismiss or are oddly fascinated by its costumed leaders and the occasional social justice provocateur that breaks into the mainstream.
It’s also why an upstart like Donald Trump preaching his self-absorbed MAGA Gospel is an odd match.
Very little was made in secular media when the Catholic bishops were on a call with Trump a few weeks ago, fawning over him mostly to seek financial aid to help Catholic education as its many schools were ailing like other institutions shut down by coronavirus. It was to my knowledge only religious journals like CRUX, AMERICA, and NCR that covered the talk and took the Bishops to task for adopting such an obsequious and supine position with Trump. (They had taken a much stronger, well-covered position on immigration and family detentions earlier on, and much of those criticisms could still be leveled at the administration. Yet, they did not bring those issues up).
But now Trump comments that “Places of worship are essential” adopting some of the rhetoric of frustrated religious leaders, and it’s BIG NEWS! It remains to be seen whether the Bishops, priests leading parishes, or the reasonable faithful themselves will be taken in by this obvious attempt by Trump to curry popular favor instead of remaining focused on what is needed to safely reopen places of worship along with the rest of the country.
As someone who worked for over two decades as a professional in catholic ministry, I watched the parishes around me move through various stages of resistance, bargaining, and acceptance with the coronavirus lockdown. Now as Virginia has begun to transition from Phase 0 to Phase 1, the Bishops and Trump are still playing an on-again, off-again game of hot-potato. That’s because the truth is we can’t entirely predict how coronavirus will behave and how one deals with those risks is different in religion and politics.
This is my quick thumbnail sketch
When coronavirus first began to be taken seriously, the Catholic church was in the season of Lent. This is a preparatory season that leads to Easter, which is even a bigger deal than Christmas. So in secular terms, it was like the pre-game season from Black Friday until Christmas Eve. This was an extremely inconvenient time to say:
“Hey how about we pause for this new thing that our President doesn't really have a handle on, but the rest of the scientific world is going crazy about?”
We were thinking—how many more days of fasting do we have left? I can’t wait to go to Easter Brunch. My kid is going to celebrate First Communion really soon.
Some folks were going to join the Church during the Easter Vigil…
It was a very busy time to all of a sudden say, “Toxic. Radioactive. Just walk away.”
As people started coming to terms with the fact that possibly none of these things were going to happen like in years past, there was resistance, criticism, and anger. The dominant way that Catholics have been trained to express this politically is to talk about religious freedoms. The government should not interfere with religious liberty and wherever it does such political leaders should be demonized and ousted. So if you wanted to shut worship down, you were the enemy.
However, many of the families in this equation have children who attend public schools. While they may be content with thoughts and prayers when it comes to mass shootings and may become more conflicted when it comes to an actual lockdown in one of their children’s schools, they understand what getting sick by contact in a school is. And dying as well. And they overwhelming don’t like it.
The county for my school district began very early to contemplate how to deal with this epidemic in theory. But very quickly a student and a staff member tested positive for corona and that was it. The schools closed, first for a few weeks, but then very rapidly we switched to distance learning for the rest of the school year.
With this move came the basic community logic:
If it’s not safe to place my children in school, what IS safe out there?
No one dropped their children off at the mall or the theater. People very quickly stopped eating out. Note, this is not the same as saying people didn’t want to eat out or find entertainment. And now after being in confinement since before St. Patrick’s Day (and seeing how badly we behaved on Cinco de Mayo) Northern VA is ready to start rocking their summer.
Memorial Day is supposed to be pool openings. And the following week (for Catholics) is the Feast of Pentecost (which formally brings the Easter Season to a close). We are ready to cram in all the Holy Feasting we didn’t get to do in Lent and Easter.
So our Governor has opened most of the state and Northern VA will soon follow. This includes the return of the public celebration of Mass (with some changes.)
We are ready to rock. Or are we?
Please keep in mind:
- Virginia, along with probably most other states, has “opened’ without meeting the original guidelines of 14 days of declining cases/deaths due to corona.
- We are also opening while maintaining social distancing rules that are not enforced uniformly. We are relying on people behaving themselves...and let’s face it, many people are not behaving well.
- This is a transition from Phase 0 to Phase 1. In simple terms: This is not back to normal.
- We don’t have the level of testing we need. We don’t have contact tracing. We don’t have a vaccine.
- We can easily regress if there is a coronavirus flare-up or a spike in deaths.
- This could be exacerbated by exactly the opening up that we are doing (by definition prematurely). So moderate your expectations and your surprise in the days/weeks to come.
A quick look at the Bishop’s guide
Our bishop’s guidelines for the public celebration of mass are very general. They do rely, in part, on guidance from the CDC and the WHO. (Not determinant as Trump falsely believes, on whether we have a Democrat(ic) Governor). They follow basic social distancing guidelines with the expectation that people will behave. They rely heavily on maintaining distance, using good ventilation, and enacting disinfection.
They also defer to parishes to make decisions locally, which means much of the work is placed on parish staff and volunteers. Such people are very well-meaning and forthright, but they are not professionally trained to deal with infectious diseases. So they go armed with a smile to inform people that only a limited number of people will be admitted into the church for celebration, hope that these folks will bring their sanitizer and face masks, and will keep 6 feet away from other groups.
[Read full guidelines here.]
Priests, for the most part, will take the responsibility to distribute communion. The 6-feet of social distancing should also be maintained in the communion line. One should “prayerfully consider” receiving communion in the hand, but it is up to the communicant to decide whether to receive in the hand or directly on the tongue. The priest is “encouraged” to disinfect his hands should he give communion directly (regardless of whether there is any physical contact). Communicants are not permitted to receive communion wearing gloves and the priest is similarly “encouraged” to disinfect himself should he make physical contact with a communicant receiving in this manner. (And somewhere in there is an unwritten assumption of when and how to remove one’s mask to receive this communion).
All of the above may be too detailed for the non-church goer, but even with reduced crowds at a church, a communion line with physical distancing and only priests distributing communion would be much longer than normal. The addition of disinfection during communion while understandable and necessary is also hard to visualize as the priest uses both hands during the distribution of communion. It’s not clear how he could easily disinfect in a timely way.
Read this cheery piece of news from one of the parishes already celebrating public mass again. Pay attention to how these masses are covered in terms of following health and safety measures. Does the priest wear a mask as well? How does he disinfect? etc. What guidelines are these parishes following or not?
In between masses the worship space needs to be disinfected. Under normal conditions, this is often a simple sweeping and picking up of litter from the pews. In some parishes where I worked, this was done by one paid custodian. But what exactly is the disinfection procedure to combat corona now? This would depend upon the parish. What are its pews made of? Is there a nursery area for babies and children or other high traffic/touch areas? What about the restroom facilities and the commons areas where people may wander or use during mass?
Conclusion
I don’t like having religion and politics improperly pitched against each other even though I live in a purple to blue state where many conservatives congregate in various Christian assemblies, including my own. I have no illusions that many Catholic Bishops have in one way or another thrown their lot via single-issue voting with more conservative views.
For the moment, in my neck of the woods, people may disagree on how soon or in what manner we should open up Virginia. The celebration of mass in logistical terms is a very straightforward ritual. It usually takes no more than an hour or an hour and a half. It has minimal requirements of sitting, standing, kneeling in place, and walking in a line to receive communion. There is often singing, though there was no mention if this would or should take place in our diocese. There is some socializing before and after, under normal circumstances. But when mass is done, people are expected to leave and go elsewhere.
If you think that simple routine is complicated under Phase 1 guidelines, imagine how complicated it is for a bar at Happy Hour or your typical restaurant. Or imagine how much more complicated your simple interaction with the cashier at the grocery store or other business in the last few weeks has been for them and their staff.
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And never forget: we have been disregarding and cutting corners from the very start. We may pride ourselves or consider ourselves lucky for having come this far. But the numbers of dead are also part of this story.
We cannot just go back to an image of the way things were.
We are not back to normal.