As a growing number of Catholic dioceses restrict activities in response to the coronavirus pandemic, priests are scrambling to keep ministering to their flocks.
“It’s minute-by-minute,” said Patrick Hyde, a Dominican priest serving at Indiana University’s St. Catholic Center. “In a 48-hour window, it went from not a whole lot happening to everything.”
This weekend, nearly every diocese in the United States either canceled public Masses or granted a dispensation to Catholics too old or too sick to attend Sunday Mass. Worldwide, many more Catholic churches have canceled their normal Mass schedules in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
Pope Francis on Sunday remarked during his weekend audience, delivered to an empty St. Peter’s Square, that priests should be “close” to people in areas affected by the disease. Francis thanked priests, in unscripted remarks, for devising “a thousand ways of being close to the people, so that the people do not feel abandoned; priests with apostolic zeal that have understood well that in times of the pandemia one should never be one who abandons [the people].”
The pope also made a pilgrimage through the emptied streets of Rome to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore and San Marcello al Corso, the latter of which contains a wooden cross believed to have delivered the city from the plague in 1522. That afternoon, the Vatican released a letter, initially thought to have been written by Francis himself, telling priests that they should be on the “front lines” of the fight against the coronavirus.
For priests such as Hyde, that means restricting physical interactions with his parishioners. The St. Paul Center has canceled nearly every activity except for the administration of the sacraments, in keeping with directives from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. And because, like many other colleges, Indiana University has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the semester, the church’s congregation now mostly consists of retirement-aged people, who are at a greater risk of contracting the illness.
“One of the challenges for us as priests is that we have a lot of contact with a lot of people,” Hyde said. “Not only are we trying to protect ourselves from getting sick, but importantly we’re trying to protect the people from being contaminated by us.”
Dan Scheidt, a pastor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Sunday found a way to keep his parish open to all members while maintaining the state of Indiana’s 250-person limit on public gatherings. Only the first 250 people were allowed in the church. The rest remained in their cars in the parking lot, where they could hear Mass on loudspeakers that parish staff had set up. At communion time, priests left the church to distribute the Eucharist in the parking lot.
“Christ asks us to follow Him unreservedly through His suffering — and that of ourselves and our brothers and sisters — tenaciously and creatively looking for the good that we can bring from these circumstances,” Scheidt told parishioners following his decision.
In many dioceses, the sacrament of confession is available even as Mass is not, but only with proper precautions put in place to keep priests and parishioners at a safe difference from each other. Others are preparing for the possibility of confession without Mass. Priests on Sunday in the Diocese of Arlington said that they will not halt confession, and a spokesman for the diocese told the Washington Examiner that it has no plans to do so.
Aquinas Guilbeau, a priest at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., said that the center is also considering different options for safely offering the sacraments to Catholics. One such idea, he said, involved installing a temporary outdoors confessional booth to reduce the spread of germs.
Guilbeau said that the cancellation of public Masses in the Archdiocese of Washington, where the House of Studies is located, should not discourage Catholics from seeking the sacraments or practicing their faith.
“The Church is not canceled,” he said. “The life of the Church continues.”
Joseph Strickland, bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, sent a similar message on Friday, when he called upon Catholics to lead Eucharistic processions around their churches and to pray “for repentance, Christ’s healing hand on the Coronavirus & that all men may be Godly, manly sons & disciples of His Son Jesus Christ.”
I call on every Catholic priest to lead a simple Eucharistic Procession around your Church sometime before the Feast of St Joseph, March 19, for repentance, Christ’s healing hand on the Coronavirus & that all men may be Godly, manly sons & disciples of His Son Jesus Christ.
— Bishop J. Strickland (@Bishopoftyler) March 11, 2020
“It was a blessing to collectively turn to the real presence of the Lord and ask him to help us and protect us,” Strickland wrote after the procession.
Other priests also took combat into their own hands. In a now-deleted tweet, Adam Young, a priest in Rhode Island, told his parishioners on Saturday that “the devil wants nothing more than for priests and parishes to stop celebrating mass” and that he was keeping his church clean by having teenagers wipe down the pews with disinfectant.
The Diocese of Providence announced Monday that it is suspending public Masses for the foreseeable future.
While dioceses in the U.S. have been forced to adjust to new conditions, Catholic churches worldwide have faced tougher strictures. Priests in Italy have been forbidden by the Italian government to visit the sick, unless to administer last rites — and even then, only if they wear gloves, a mask, and disposable gown. More than 10 priests in Italy have died from the coronavirus. The first case of the coronavirus in a priest in the U.S. was confirmed Sunday, Alejandro Trejo, who had traveled to Israel recently on a pilgrimage.
