When the Pandemic first started, I published this item on one of our companion blogs*:
Churches of the West: The Church and Pandemic.: St. Mary's Cathedral, Diocese of Cheyenne Wyoming. When this particular blog was started back in 2011 its stated purposes was...
I understand our Diocese's orders, to a degree, during the pandemic. The Diocese had to close the door to public Masses. It had no other humane choice. Catholics are obligated to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days and our community, where Catholics are a minority, has a grand total of at least ten Catholic Masses per weekend. That's a lot. A lot of those Masses are heavily attended.
Added to this, during normal period on the liturgical calendar there are still things going on in the Church or Parish as rule. Confessions are held weekly more frequently than that. There are meetings. And there are Baptisms and Marriages. So a lot is going on in a Church.
During Lent, even more is going on.
So those voices that proclaim that nothing should have been done to disrupt normal Parish life are flat out wrong.
Which doesn't mean that the critics don't have a point.
Those critics, of course, have to be understood in the context of the Catholic (the word means "Universal") Church being global, but the churches being local. That is, the local Bishop of a Diocese impacts the daily lives of average Catholics a lot more than the Pope does.
And that's where, at least to some degree, legitimate criticism can be levied.
The response to the pandemic has varied from diocese to diocese around the globe and from diocese to diocese around the country. And it is not uniform in any sense, nor would we expect it to be. So any criticism about the Bishops doing this or that are incorrect from the onset. A person probably only really grasp what the Bishop of their Diocese is doing, although quite a few of them have done very similar things. Our Diocese took one of the most extreme, if a person cares to define it that way, approaches.
All the sacraments were cancelled save for Confessions where there was a risk of death.
I'll be frank that I feel the order went way too far from the onset. In a discussion with a very Catholic friend, he posed the question of "well, what if priests had become ill and died?", which is a highly legitimate point. And I'm not arguing that we should have ignored the state's order and simply charged on as if nothing was happening. But shutting down all the sacraments was simply too much. As I pointed out to my friend, what about those who were to be married and simply shrugged their shoulders in our era of weak fealty and started keeping house, something we observant Catholics regard as a mortal sin? And what about people who would have gone to Confession and simply took Pope Francis' suggestion of "perfect contrition" lightly, and figured they were good to go. Some likely have passed and some who don't study such things will simply assume that perhaps that counts from here on out and they don't have to observe the Church's laws in regard to at least an annual Confession? And what about those who have simply accommodated themselves to televised Mass or no Mass at all, violation of the Church's canons though they are in normal times. Everyone has met people who have allowed their consciences to become elastic to accommodate their personal desires or laziness.
Indeed, the Church, as opposed to Protestant Churches, has at least in part kept a set of canons requiring participation for that reason. Catholics regard it as a mortal sin not to go to Mass, if they can, on Holy Days and Sundays not because it's in the Bible, but because its a law imposed by the Church. Indeed, Protestants rarely grasp that Catholics don't regard Protestant failing to observe Catholic Canons as committing serious sins, which is not to say that there aren't serious sins everyone is to avoid. I.e, Protestants aren't expected to observe Catholic Holy Days for instance.
None of which, again, is to suggest that the Church should have ignored the virus and kept the public Masses.
But it is to say that the cancellation of everything else, where it occurred, and it occurred here, was a mistake. Baptisms could clearly have been handled with low risk and there was never any sort of state order requiring them to be cancelled. Marriages could have been too if the couples were willing to go forward with hardly anyone in attendance. That anyone would consider that in this era would surprise many but I personally know a young couple who were married of their own volition in just such a way, and I myself recall stepping into the Church years ago on a Wednesday night when there was a marriage going on, elaborate white dress and all, with less than ten people in attendance.
Likewise, people being brought into the Church as adults could have been.
Confessions under some circumstances should have been allowed. Yes, I don't want a line to the Confessional on Saturdays going on right now but cancelling all private Confession in a time of crises was not the right thing to do in my view. There were ways to accommodate that.
And failing to grasp communications in this modern era is, in my view, an enormous failure.
A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic in Oklahoma tells me that in his archdiocese they are getting weekly emails from that archdiocese.
We aren't.
Now, to a degree, that doesn't surprise me. Catholic parishes are large and no doubt the diocese doesn't have hardly any of our email addresses. But it goes beyond that.
Our Bishops original orders expired on Thursday, April 30. That should mean that a continuation of them in some form should have been widely distributed prior to that.
Nothing was.
What happened instead was a press release.
Now, most people don't get press releases and the Diocese doesn't even publish its own press releases, for the most part, on its website. Checking it this morning what remains as the case is that there's a press release from back in January regarding the Diocese's actions in regard to a Bishop who served long, long ago. While that story is real news and while the Diocese took the proper and strong action regarding it, most Wyoming Catholic probably didn't live in the state back then or weren't alive back then. It's the sort of attention headline grabbing story that deserves to be an attention grabbing headline story, and which if the Press applied its focus more broadly, would show up a lot more in regard to other institution, particularly schools.
But as far as the lives of average Catholics go, Mass closures matter a lot more.
And we're learning the status of that on the second page of the Tribune, with a headline reading, if you just read on line:
Cheyenne diocese says it will continue to suspend Mass through mid-May
Or, if you read the e-edition or print edition:
Mass Closures To Continue
Now, in fairness, the proactive Priests of the diocese will contact those that they can, or answer questions from those who pose them, and post an announcement to their online bulletins, or make a Youtube or Facebook announcement. So it'll get out that way.
But is that good enough?
I'm submit it isn't.
Indeed, delivering a press announcement in 2020 in a state where we're a large minority means that most people are left without anything unless they're proactive. Most people don't read the newspapers anymore. And an announcement delivered so late that it comes out the day of the vigil of Sunday is not going to get to most people.
In an earlier time, when a lot of Catholics lived in the Catholic Ghetto in the United States, or in Catholic communities, or where most Catholics in communities like ours where Catholics are a minority, had a means by which such news traveled pretty quickly, and often by the parish priest. Parish priests weren't moved much, if at all, and they knew their parishioners. Indeed, even here, it would have been the case that a lot of priests would have been in a community for decades, would have eaten frequently at parishioners homes, would have gone to their high school sporting events, and would have stopped by the Knights of Columbus, where a lot of the men would have been members, nightly to make sure that things were in control at the bar and people were heading home.
Some of that still occurs, but I frankly think it's a lot less than it used to be. There are indeed still small parishes, or even large ones, where parishioners are really tight with a priest, but as Americans have lost connection with their own communities, which they have, that tight bond isn't there to the same degree, in my view. Indeed, I don't think that tight bond is there with anything, which is why a writer like Wendell Berry would write a book called
Becoming Native To This Place. It's one of the huge holes in modern American life.
So, circling back, how does an oilfield worker from Texas get the news? What about a junior accountant who moved up from Colorado? You get the point.
Indeed, at this time a lot of Catholic parishioners are in the category of "vagabondi", moving from parish to parish as convenient, which is acceptable in the Church. They donate where they go, but they aren't really listed anywhere, and they probably aren't being contacted. Indeed, as far as I can tell, written communication around here has been pretty limited during the closure.
An assumption that on a Saturday morning most people are going to read the news in a newspaper and then call anyone they know who doesn't get it is flat out wrong, if such an assumption was made. Simply waiting until Friday to say anything at all is likewise not a very good way to communicate anything to a group of people who are morally bound to attend Mass if they can. It makes no sense at all.
The same news also informs the readers, most of whom will not be Catholic, that Confessions by appointment are now resumed, which is a good thing, and that Masses after the 15th will be resumed but the present restrictions on public gathering, which actually will expire on that date, will also be observed. I'm not sure what that means, but the size of gatherings is now very limited so, if that holds, and means what it says, logic would presume that the requirement to attend Mass will remain suspended as there's no earthly way to do that for all the Catholics in most parishes, even if Masses were run all day long on Sunday, which they can't be as Canon Law restricts the number of Masses a Priest can say in a day. Perhaps that latter restriction makes sense, but we're still being informed of this in a very poor way.
As noted, every Diocese is different and this isn't applicable everywhere. But rising to his crisis does not appear to have been done very well in Cheyenne.
If this seems to be asking for too much,and I'd strenuously argue it isn't, other institutions haven't been similarly lacking. The courts, for example, have been excellent in sending out information. And the Diocese, in this modern era, does have a website where an announcement could have been placed front and center.
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*I debated posting this comment at all as I'm not disloyal, and I also wasn't sure if I should post it first here, or on that blog. Ultimately I decided to post it, and here, as it is a local item for one thing, and a communications matter, at least in part, secondly.
