On the other, the "social distancing" constraints are absurd. We can grant that they're more or less consistent with constraints imposed on secular businesses and activities, but it also needs to be recognized that they amount to a massive face-saving exercise by civil authorities whose incompetence and gross miscalculations have caused great damage.
The precise conditions will vary among dioceses and civil jurisdictions, but on the whole they amount to
- Face masks required for all but the immediate consumption of the host, on the hand, no wine
- No singing except by cantor
- Responses optional and not encouraged
- Maximum attendance 100 regardless of capacity, enforced by on line reservation, tickets checked at the door
- Temperature taken and health questions asked at the door
- Six feet"social distancing" enforced by ushers, who regulated seating
- Alternate pews roped off
- Missals and other mass materials removed from pews
- Six-foot intervals marked off on sidewalks and church entry area with day-glo orange paint
- A reminder was made immediately before the peace that social distance was to be observed
- No baskets passed for offertory; envelopes deposited in basket on exit.
I certainly don't mean to disparage either our parish or the archdiocese. These conditions have been imposed by civil authorities, and both the parish and the archdiocese are going to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate good faith in implementing them in a most conscientious way. In fact, leaving all else aside, this speaks to the overall competence and willingness to undertake hard work and sacrifice that the parish has displayed since we started there.
On the other hand, our pastor stressed the word "temporary" twice in his concluding announcements at the end of the mass. As I've observed in the course of re-emerging from lockdown to conduct ordinary business over the past week, "social distancing" measures amount to a bizarre ritual that gets in the way of ordinary tasks like walking down the sidewalk or paying for a haircut or service at the car dealer.
Consider that Karl Manke, the famous Owosso, MI barber, reopened his barber shop without permission on May 4. With only a few days off since then, he must have given hundreds of haircuts. (Photos indicate that he wears a mask, but his customers do not. In LA, he'd need to wear gloves as well, and customers must wear both masks and gloves.) Yet if any of his hundreds of customers had so much as tested positive for COVID, much less been hospitalized, the media would have been all over it. So far, not a peep.
By the same token, there have been numerous cases over the past month where masses of people, on Virginia beaches, Missouri swimming pools, innumerable block parties, and anywhere else, have flouted "social distancing" rules. No mass graves have resulted, nor indeed any sort of media we-told-you hysteria, from any of these episodes. And over the past week, "social distancing" was more or less officially suspended due to riot exemption for hundreds of thousands.
Nobody seems to believe there will be any serious spike in cases as a result of that. For now, citizens are continuing to display good faith in resuming "social distancing" decorum on the understanding, articulated by our own pastor, that these measures are temporary, though they amount to nothing more than a pusillanimous face-saving exercise. Drs Birx and Fauci have vanished from the public eye. They ought to; they should be ashamed.
We'll have to see in coming weeks how "tempoarary" these measures turn out to be.
