On the ongoing dispensation for Mass attendance
The Bishop of Cheyenne has continued his disposition to attend Mass due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. His decree on the same is here:
First of all, I'm going to be blunt. The Diocese of Cheyenne has done a remarkably bad job during the Coronavirus Pandemic in getting the news out on anything.
Bad.
The Diocese seems to be of the view that Catholics in this state all check the web all the time, will log into parish websites, or maybe are in some sort of day to day communication with the parish.
They aren't.
Some are, and I can vouch for that as I was once on a Parish Council. There's a group of dedicated parishioners who are in constant contact with the Priest and their parishes, but there are a lot who very much are not.
Indeed, one of the real ironies in all of this is that Bishop Steven Biegler, who has only been in that position for a couple of years, has a fairly apparent interests in trying to reach Hispanic Catholics, who very much need to be reached. But to understand why we have so many Hispanic Catholics here, you also have to understand that we have a high transient population, much of which is based in the oilfield. I defended the depositions of two Mexican oilfield workers just a couple of weeks ago, and this is common. My guess is that the Hispanic population itself here has dramatically reduced in numbers over the past year, due to the oilfield depression, but be that as it may, I am extremely doubtful that Hispanic parishioners are going to be reached by their logging into the website of the Diocese or their Parish.
To add to that, neither are a lot of average parishioners. I haven't been contacted even once during the pandemic and I was a Parish Council member up until just before it hit, which also was just before the last Priest rotation. My guess is that I'm probably not on the active Parish roles anymore even though its my home Parish, as I started attending an across town Parish (I'm equidistant from all the Parishes in town) when the Mass schedule was changed as part of an evident effort to make it more convenient for Hispanic parishioners. I'm not complaining about that change, as its clear to me that they need to be reached, but when I switched where I normally go, I also started making my donations there, as I was there. As other family members also attend there, and as its a parish that I've attended at various points in the past (as I noted its just as close as my home parish, in terms of time of travel), they recognized me pretty quickly.
I suppose my overall point is is that I have had for a long time a vague feeling that Bishops don't always understand their Diocese very well. Our current Bishop is from South Dakota, a neighboring state, and that cuts against my argument. The prior one was from Wisconsin and a farmer by background, and a hunter, so he did have a grasp of the nature of where he was and seemed to appreciate that (he's now in Alaska). But cutting against that, it seems to me, are the seeming assumptions that everyone knows what is going on and everyone is checking in. Those sorts of parishes sound more like the ones the Priests on Catholic Stuff You Should Know discuss in Denver, rather than here, but maybe that's just me.
Even if it is just me, somebody should be reaching out. That isn't happening locally.
And as evidence of that, I only learned about the continued dispensation as the old one was running out, I think, on December 15, and I logged on a couple of weeks ago to see if my recollection was correct. To my surprise, it had been continued.
You'd have thought that there would have been an effort to reach out to people about this.
If there was, it didn't reach me.
So hence my complaint.
I'll further note that I was not happy with the churches closing in the first place. I'll admit now that my view was wrong. I was also very much unhappy with the suspension of all sacraments, which has been lifted. I don't think completely suspending Confession the way that itw as done was the right thing to do and I don't think it should have been done. I was nearly as glad to see the ban on Confessions lifted as I was to see Masses restored, as odd as that may seem.
When Masses were restored I started going again, but as the pandemic heated back up, I dropped back out the last few weeks. Hence the reason for my checking.
During this crisis I've learned that I miss Mass for sure and as a lifelong Catholic I've come to admire, as odd as that may seem, dedicated Protestants and Orthodox who go every Sunday not because of a church law but because they choose too. And when things opened back up, and I could go, I chose to. My suspension the last couple of weeks is because I'm one of those folks who have "conditions".
I'm in good health, but I had asthma pretty severely as a kid and it resumed after I went to law school for a period of time. When I was a kid I had to take shots weekly, or maybe it was biweekly, for what seemed like years, although the way such recollections work probably means it was not as great of period of time as I recall. The shots made things less worse, but not better. Fall was always a period of agony for me until I went to university the first time, and then they oddly left for the most par. I was aware that allergies could come and go, but I didn't expect it to occur to me.* I was very glad they had.
And then they returned when I was in law school. Pretty severely, in fact, and to some plant pollens I'd never been allergic to before. That caused me to have to resort to shots once again.
That helped clear things up for years, and indeed the allergies mostly seemed to go away. Here a couple of years ago we got a dog for the first time in our long marriage, and it was a breed advertised as hypoallergenic. It really seems to be. Before that, we obtained a cat as well, which we had for years. He simply moved in.
Having the cat caused me to believe that my animal allergies, which were widespread, had likely vanished. Cats are one of the things that I knew for certain that I was allergic to. Prior to getting the dog I went in to be tested and, nope, all the things I'd ever been allergic to, I still am.
Why aren't I reacting to them?
I have no idea.
I do know that in the fall in a bad year I'll get sick. I generally recognize what it is, but frankly it's very difficult to determine at the onset if its a cold, severe cold, allergies, or severe allergies. Long experience lets me generally guess right. Usually I only have to worry about this in the fall, as noted, and some falls, like this past one, not at all. Usually during the winter I'll experience some mild allergy symptoms all year long, which I think is due to working in a building that's over 100 years old. There's something in it, and when its really locked up and airtight, that gets to me. I can tell that's not a cold.
One of the things about having had a fairly pronounced asthma condition is that if you've had it, and probably early on before you knew you had it, you may very well have experienced nearly dying. Some asthmatics experience that repeatedly. I have. The experience is something nearly unique to asthmatics and its something that psychologist state that they rarely will describe to anyone. There's good reason for that, one being that its nearly indescribable.
The best actual description I've ever seen is set out in the book Mornings On Horseback, which is about Theodore Roosevelt's youth. TR was a severe asthmatic as a kid. The description is right on. What is hard to relate about it is that when a severe attack sets in you reach a point where you know that you are in real trouble and you are headed for death. It's pretty obvious. When you pull back out and recover you are exhausted, but also, oddly, euphoric, as you've cheated death. Those who have been asthmatics for a period of time, if they're conditions is serious, have experienced that again and again.
You also really learn to avoid what is trying to kill you like nothing else.
Which brings me back around to this.
Nobody ever recovers from an injury or affliction, really. If you've had some sort of severe condition, its' done its damage. Asthmatics that were well treated as kids usually have overcome it in part because they've been forced to develop their bodies. It's an oddity for sure, but at 57 years old I'm in a lot better shape than most 57 years old, a byproduct in part of the way our family has always lived but also in part due to my parents making sure I was active when I was young, mostly in swimming which is a good sport for asthmatics. But nonetheless, if you get a severe cold or flu, you remember the condition of your youth. When the wheezes stats to set in you recall what it was like and that death was always right around the corner. "Feeling poorly?" comes the question. "Having a hard time breathing" comes the answer. But in reality, you're laying on the sofa and death is in the chair across the room, you know it.
Most asthmatics also tend to become fairly fatalistic. There are those who claim that people can't imagine their own deaths and don't ever really accept that it will occur. I think that's baloney, and in reality what that might mean is pampered modern Americans can't imagine it and always imagine that in their 80s they'll really be in their 30s, but people who have had asthma can. Death has come and saddled you up on his horse plenty of times, and then simply dropped you back off. You know that one day he's coming again and won't let ago.
Generally we don't hope that's earlier than it needs to be, and hence why I've sat out the past few weeks.**
I frankly feel horrible about it and I don't think I personally do well without going to Mass and experiencing Christ in the Mass. I don't do well with alternatives. I'm hoping this is all over very soon.
I guess I understand the continuation of the dispensation, although at this point it frankly isn't worded very clearly. It seems we have a dispensation, and I think that my concerns qualify me for it, but it almost seems to be a qualified dispensation.
But at this point, somebody really needs to reach out.
*Indeed one of the features of having severe allergies is not only this mystery, but the common misunderstandings about it. I retain allergies, but I've endured a lecture from a person at one time who insisted that all childhood allergies vanish, something you can't tell somebody for whom they have not vanished.
**Which brings me to hypocrisy. I've gone in to work the entire time, which seems hypocritical, but I've also tried to avoid contact as much as possible with as many people as possible.
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