Diocese of Madison, WI Threatens To Sue City

Three weeks ago, I posted on the unique case of Madison, WI, which after the state supreme court voided all state COVID regulations, elected to reimpose its own, indeed going beyond previous state policies by singling out "houses of worship" for even more stringent controls. Nearly all other jurisdictions in the state were advised by their respective attorneys that the state supreme court's ruling probably applied to local jurisdictions as well and suggested at minimum that cities and counties would not have the budget to litigate the issue if it came to that.

Only the city-county of Madison and Dane, WI and Milwaukee elected to impose new restrictions given that advice, although Madison withdrew its more restrictive regulation for "houses of worship". Via this story in the Wisconsin State Journal, I find that as of Wednesday, the Diocese of Madison, WI is threatening to sue the city and county for its restrictive regulation:

A Washington, D.C.-based law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases has sent a letter to Dane County and city of Madison officials saying their coronavirus reopening plan discriminates against the Madison Catholic Diocese.

In a letter sent Wednesday on behalf of the diocese to Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, County Executive Joe Parisi and Janel Heinrich, director of the joint city-county health department, attorneys with the nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and three other law firms say the county’s Forward Dane plan unconstitutionally singles out churches for tougher gathering restrictions than many other venues.

Under the plan, attendance at religious institutions is limited to 25% of their capacity, up to a maximum of 50 congregants, in the current Phase 1 of the three-phase plan. Other venues, including shopping malls, gyms and theaters, are simply limited to 25% capacity, with no specific upper limit.

. . . The diocese crafted a reopening plan based on that limit only to see the department issue a new order a few days later that added the 50-person restriction, lawyers for the diocese said.

Lawyers for the diocese called this “an abrupt and inexplicable reversal” that “means that some churches are held to as low as 5% capacity while trampoline parks, movie theaters and virtually all other entities can operate to at least 25%.”

Madison assistant city attorney Marci Paulsen acknowledged last week that when the public health department adopted the regulations in the invalidated statewide order into its own local order, the department “included religious entities as a business, thereby ensuring that religious entities were treated equally as businesses,” and under the initial order, “all businesses had the 25% capacity limit.”

But she said that with the public health department adopting the new order to replace the first one, it added a 50-person limit on “mass gatherings” and defined such gatherings as “scheduled events.”

At minimum, this shows the arbitrary, "We're making it up as we go along" nature of local jurisdictions' response to COVID, such that nobody can make good-faith plans in the face of ever-changing regulations, or indeed inconsistent enforcement.

And it's less and less clear that COVID represents a crisis. Presentation of COVID statistics in the media is less than lucid, with "case" numbers due simply to increased testing reported as a "spike", when such positive tests are almost always asymptomatic. But in general, it appears that states with fewer restrictions, like Georgia and Wisconsin, don't differ much from those with far greater restrictions, and in any case, the actual impact of COVID has proven about the same as a severe seasonal flu.

Beyond that is the puzzling situation whereby anti-police demonstrations, let alone riots and looting, are universally not subject to COVID "social distancing" enforcement. It's notable that the current Madison regulations for "mass gatherings" apply to "scheduled" events, leaving riots and such out of the criteria, since they're putatively "unscheduled".

The story linked above refers to what appear to be "consultations" between the diocese and local officials, which suggests that the diocese is following the strategy employed in Minnesota and California. So far, I've seen no update since Wednesday on the situation in Madison. Although the city cites the recent US Supreme Court case allowing substantially similar restrictions to other businesses for churches, it's worth noting that the Supreme Court ruled on regulations that were lifted or loosened at the last minute in response to the churches' appeals. Madison has so far not made equivalent changes.

I would guess that the ongoing, seemingly arbitrary changes to the regulations probably make them unenforceable in any case, especially given the general unwillingness or inability of any local authorities to enforce such limits for demonstrations or riots. I would think that any attempt to penalize a church for exceeding Madison's limits in this context would simply be thrown out of court.

If anyone finds updates on this case, I'll be grateful for links.

Let's Look At The Demand Side Of The Equation

For the past couple of days, we've looked at the supply side of the ordinariate clergy market, in particular the personnel moves involving the parochial vicar position at Our Lady of the Atonement. (I would say "curate", but we've dropped the Anglicanorum from the coetibus.) In secular terms, Bp Lopes has cut Fr Moore's hours, at least insofar as his ordinariate work is concerned, and sent him to Indianapolis so Bp Lopes can put Fr Jenkins into the Atonement slot, transferring him from Wisconsin, where at least from the ordinariate's viewpoint he'd had ho hours, but now in Texas he's full time.

From a secular standpoint, if we were talking stock clerks in a store, there aren't enough hours to pay two full time positions, so either one worker gets full hours and another gets very few, or each could be paid less than full time, but there'd be a greater appearance of equity. But as it happens, at least part time work is available in a different store to make up the difference. In secular terms, there's not enough work at Joe's Auto Parts to pay two full time clerks, but Bert's Garage has so much business that at least the one who's short on hours can make up the time -- although the work at Bert's Garage is harder and dirtier.

That was the supply side. Why is the demand side such that there aren't enough hours to justify two full time workers, at least at Joe's Auto Parts? Good question. A visitor sent me a viewpoint on this earlier this weak:

Your blog today reminds me of the market response when presented with two platforms for viewing/recording movies in the pioneer age of home available videos. In most respects, Betamax was a superior platform in terms of quality of image and retention but cost more for the device and the media to be used compared to VHS. It is no secret which platform survived. All the “..but the image quality was better”, “… the sound is better!”, “…you don’t know what you are missing.” gave way to a platform more people exponentially would access because it was more affordable and the trade-off between cost and quality was deemed by masses as acceptable.

Yes, I think most Catholics would love a high quality Mass with professional grade choirs and music, beautiful visuals of clothing, vessels, and surroundings but they are willing to trade off some of that beauty or singing quality or grandeur to have a good Mass that is convenient, consistent and allows some leeway for dress, attitude and possibly even catechesis. God is perfect, man is not. So what is the goal? To cast a small, specific net for only a few of the highest quality fish we can get or to cast a wide net to gather the highest number of maybe not so perfect fish?

If you exchange the word “souls” for “fish” in the previous sentence you can see this playing out before our eyes with the Ordinariate experiment. My money is on VHS fish.

I think there are other factors in the "least bad" model. In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which is liturgically diverse as well as diverse in every other way, there are at least three Latin masses within about half an hour's drive on Sunday. We've never been seriously tempted to try any out. We found a novus ordo parish nearby with a music program probably better than any Episcopalian parish we've attended and hardworking, inspiring clergy, one of whom is probably the smartest man I've ever met (I haven't actually met Prof Feser).

In part, this is probably because we didn't go into the Church with a checklist of Things We Wanted, which of course would amount to Things We Wanted Out Of The Almighty, when of course He would have a different plan in any case. The Almighty, when you think about it, doesn't need to do market research.

It seems to me that liturgy is only one part of the formula, but the ordinariates are focusing almost entirely on liturgy -- in fact, the re-emphasis on the Divine Worship missal as a special kind of extreme mass that only by-the-way incorporates Anglican contributions drops a good part of the original rationale behind the Pastoral Provision, that it would appeal to conservative Episcopalians who were looking for something recognizable in a Catholic parish.

In fact, the impression I have is that more Catholic parishes are seeking, with programs like LifeTeen, to incorporate more Evangelical and Charismatic features in worship. This movement certainly seems to have much more energy -- and indeed, far more money -- behind it than the liturgical perfectionism implicit in the ordinariates.

The bottom line is that, even in an environment where the secular rewards for ordinariate clergy are mostly nowhere near as great as those for main line Protestant clergy, the North American ordinariate has too many priests, such that for many, their positions are part time. And let's face it, the low pay is creating a high defect rate, but the store is doing so poorly it can't hire a competent quality assurance inspector.

Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

Houston, Indianapolis, And The Problem Of Incompetence

Houston has had a flurry of clergy reassignments that correspond at least chronologically with the reassignments dioceses make in the real world in reaction to the summer's ordinations. (However, Houston didn't announce these; I did.) For some weeks I began to think this might reflect Bp Lopes's recovery from indisposition and a renewed interest in actually leading his little ordinariate on to greater things. Now I'm less sure.

It seems to me that what we've been seeing for some months now in the world at large stemming first from a "pandemic" that somehow didn't lead to mass graves or people falling dead in the streets, but has now been superseded by riots and looting. All of this represents a serious crisis of leadership elites that's been raging unabated -- the urgent remedies to the crises proposed by said elites include liturgical reforms, such as strictly limiting singing in church, and now in the UK an official ban on fornication:

Under amendments introduced to English rules on Monday, no person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place indoors and consists of two or more persons. Britain's tabloid media cast it as a "bonking ban".

"What this is about is making sure we don't have people staying away from home at night," British junior housing minister Simon Clarke told LBC radio when questioned about the ban.

In the US. social distancing rules apply unless you're rioting and looting, in which case there's actually something of a religious exemption:

But this is a long way of saying that pervasive crises reflect themselves across all of society. Just because the North American ordinariate is small doesn't exempt it from the crisis of competence that affects mayors and governors across the US. And this brings me to the question, "What problem is Bp Lopes trying to solve by sending Fr Moore to Indianapolis?"

This is a problem that, judging from the subtext of Fr McCarthy's announcement in Sunday's bulletin at Holy Rosary that I quoted yesterday, has him stumped as well. My regular correspondent asked something similar:

I doubt that the St Joseph of Arimathea group has grown much since Luke Reese’s departure—-possibly it has shrunk, given that there is no community leadership or activity outside of the Sunday 8 am DW mass at Holy Rosary. So they will need to hold mass in rented or borrowed facilities, presumably those owned by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

It may or may not even be a continuation of the DW mass at Holy Rosary, since Fr Moore will have no connection with that parish and will be in hospital chaplain work. So let me try to get this straight:

• Fr Moore has been taken out of parish work at Our Lady of the Atonement
• He will not be in parish work with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, he will be a hospital chaplain
• His only parish ministry will be to a dozen or so ordinariate members there
• But although it is generally recognized that the ordinariate charism is liturgical, they will have no more than the most provisional resources for liturgy.

And the record of such startup, or restart, groups has been abysmal -- and there's no indication that Fr Moore has any particular talent in that direction, any more than the other married Protestants who've been forced to leave their old job markets for ordinariate careers.

So what problem is Bp Lopes trying to solve by moving Fr Moore to Indianapolis, where he won't have any supervision?

Last week I linked to Fr Simington's farewell letter to the St Alban's parish in Rochester, NY, where he seems to be deeply puzzled at a similar question: what problem is Bp Lopes trying to solve by moving him to Irvine?

It's hard to avoid thinking the purposes of the Almighty are bringing about a crisis of competence in many areas of contemporary life, and His Church is not exempt.

Confusion In Indy

I posted a couple of weeks ago on Fr Jeffrey Moore' move from Our Lady of the Atonement to Indianapolis, but it didn't make his status at the Holy Rosary parish there completely clear. A visitor forwarded an announcement from the Holy Rosary bulletin on May 31 that makes things only slightly less murky:

I recently received good news from the Anglican Use Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, along with confirmation from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, that a priest from the Ordinariate, Fr. Jeffery Moore, is being sent to Indiana to work with and grow the Anglican Use community our state. Additionally, and along with the assignment of Fr. Moore, the Ordinariate expressed the intention to canonically erect a community here in Indiana. (While the Ordinariate has assigned clergy to work here at Holy Rosary, officially the Anglican Use community here has always been a ministry of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and of Holy Rosary Parish, and has never had formal canonical recognition within the Ordinariate.)

Fr. Moore is currently the parochial vicar at Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church, a parish of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter in San Antonio, Texas. He also serves as the chaplain of the Mother of the Americas Institute, a think tank for the new evangelization. A husband and father of several children, he had been an Episcopal clergyman until converting to Catholicism in 2006. He has been a Catholic priest for 10 years. I have met with Fr. Moore and informed him of the history of the Anglican Use community here at Holy Rosary. I will continue to work with him as he seeks to establish an independent Anglican Use community as part of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. The details of his assignment and of that canonical transition are still being worked out.

While Fr. Moore is being assigned to work with the Anglican Use community in Indiana, the Archdiocese of Indianapolis has made it clear that he is not being assigned to Holy Rosary and will not be part of the staff or exercising his priestly ministry as part of Holy Rosary Parish. It seems likely that he will be working full time as a hospital chaplain or some other related ministry while celebrating the Anglican Use liturgies. Not even the official date of arrival has been set for Fr. Moore and his family. It is likely that he and they will arrive in Indianapolis sometime toward the end of June or beginning of July. We will pro- vide updates as we learn more. When the Moores do eventually arrive and you see Father or his family around Holy Rosary, please be sure to extend a warm Hoosier welcome to them.

— Fr McCarthy

What's clear is that the Archdiocese of Indianapolis is keeping something more than an arm's length distance -- maybe more like six feet of social separation -- from this project, which is probably prudent, given its experience with Fr Luke Reese, the ordinariate priest who left his assignment at Holy Rosary following his arrest for battery and kidnapping in 2018. Fool me once, shame on you, huh?

Fr McCarthy's somewhat uncertain use of the term "Anglican Use" also reflects what seems to be an uncertainty in the archdiocese about what's going on more generally. My regular correspondent notes,

“[F]ormal canonical recognition” or no, St Joseph of Arimathea, Indianapolis was on the “Parish Finder” page of the OCSP website for years until Luke Reese’s departure. I note that Fr McCarthy avoids using the name St Joseph of Arimathea (forcing him to use the officially frowned-on term “Anglican Use” four times in his brief message), refers to “clergy” being assigned by the Ordinariate to work at Holy Rosary, when there was of course only Luke Reese, and ends on a strange “nobody tells me anything” note despite the fact that the official notification of new assignments by Bp Lopes specifically mentioned that Fr Moore would be doing hospital chaplaincy work and gave the date of his assignment as July 1.

Luke Reese was employed by Holy Rosary for four years as Director of Music while attending seminary before coming on to the Holy Rosary staff full-time as a priest. Perhaps once bitten, twice shy and Fr McCarthy wishes to establish a wide(r) berth between his parish and the “Anglican Use” group.

My correspondent discovered this account of the St Joseph of Arimathea group's reception into the Church as a community of the North American ordinriate in 2012. In fact, the archdiocese listed it as the fourth group to join the ordinriate at the time. A 2016 bulletin from Holy Rosary says, “Our parish is host to the Ordinariate’s presence in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis”.

So at this point, we don't know if the ordinariate community in Indianapolis will continue to meet at Holy Rosary, nor whether it will be reestablished under that name or under some other. It certainly isn't clear whether Fr Moore or his family will attend mass at Holy Rosary or show up there at all. But I'm sure if they do, the parish will welcome them warmly. The archdiocese, maybe with more reserve.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Responding to yesterday's post on the closure of the St Margaret's Katy, TX community, a visitor commented,

Katy is close to where Walsingham is in Houston. Why would there have been a group started there in the past if they could just drive 15 minutes?

It seems pretty clear that this was nothing more than a half-baked effort to create jobs for Fr Sellers and one or two other favored priests. The others, of course, have been folded into the Our Lady of Walsingham staff. My regular correspondent commented,

The skeptics on the Facebook forum who refused to believe that the group has folded were informed by a Walsingham parishioner that two candidates from St Margaret’s were presented with the Walsingham candidates for confirmation on Pentecost, and it was announced that the congregations were merging.

So I get the impression that there are something like half a dozen priests now connected with the Houston cathedral, including Bp Lopes, Fr Perkins, Fr Hough IV, Fr Michoacan, Fr Fletcher, and three deacons. Have I left anyone out? [Yes, Fr Kramer, vocation director.] This is for a parish numbering in the very low four figures, and a total "diocese" numbering still in four figures, the size of one normal Catholic parish. I can't see any of these men being overtaxed, either working for the parish or the "diocese". Yet they seem to live quite well.

My regular correspondent reflected on the overall question of the unstable and marginal ordinariate communities:

None of the North American ordinariate start-ups has achieved parish status in five years and a number (St Alban, Greenville. SC; St Bede, St Louis Pk, MN; St Gilbert, Boerne, TX; Our Lady of Mt Carmel, Savannah; St Margaret's Katy, TX) have folded. [St Augustine San Diego is on borrowed time as well.] The smallest of the former “continuing” Anglican groups which entered have remained small Ordinariate communities which will probably not outlast the clergyman who led them in, or, in a few cases, a committed lay leader. St Joseph of Arimathea, Indianapolis is atypical in that it is getting new clerical leadership after the departure of its founding priest, albeit two and a half years after that event.

UPDATE: My correspondent knows of other communities that have been closed:

I omitted St Augustine’s from my list of endangered groups because I was just listing communities “gathered” as a condition of someone’s ordination. St Augustine was originally an ACA community in Oceanside, CA. If we include former “continuing” parishes now folded or on the brink, there are four or five more: San Agustin, Pinecrest, FL; St Anselm, Corpus Christi,TX; St Edmund, Kitchener, ON; St Gregory the Great—-both the one in Stoneham, MA and the one in Mobile, AL.

My correspondent points to another, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Jacksonville, NC.

This group no longer has a website and its Facebook page is a stub, but it apparently continues to meet in a strip mall storefront (probably not right now, as the space is too small to allow for the social distancing required by the local diocese). This link is a YouTube video of Fr Waun, the parish administrator, preaching there in March of this year. I am assuming it is at OLGC because of the glimpse of the acoustic tile ceiling at the beginning and what appears to be a homemade altar to Fr Waun’s left. A clue to a possible motive for the continued existence of the group: Fr Waun has been awarded a renewed three year contract to provide RC chaplaincy services to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville.

In other words, like so many of the arrangements in the North American ordinariate, the position exists to benefit the priest, not to perform any particular service for ordinariate laity. The problem continues to be that there are often just not enough laity on the ground to justify the priest, no matter how Houston tries to paint the picture.

This makes something like a dozen communities that have folded to date, while we don't know what the potential is from the COVID lockdowns.

St Margaret's Katy, TX Ordinariate Community Closes

Based on posts on the "Catholic Ordinariates of Anglican Tradition Informal Conversation Forum" (whew!) Facebook group, my regular correspondent notes that the St Margaret's Katy, TX ordinariate group has been suppressed by Bp Lopes,

Peter Jesserer Smith is looking for answers, on the actually quite reasonable basis that information sharing helps communities learn and grow. An idea Houston vigorously rejects, in my observation. In any event, there is a picture (from a while back) on the FB page with maybe twenty-five or thirty lay members so of course by OCSP standards this was a not entirely negligible community which has now ceased to exist, despite an abundance of local Ordinariate clergy.

Well, the ordinariates are clergy-centered enterprises, one of whose key functions is to provide career paths for married Protestant refugees from that job market who haven't learned to code. My correspondent continues,

I always assumed that despite Fr Sellers’ initial efforts to recruit membership from among his former TEC parishioners in the area, the majority of those attending St Margaret were connected with the school where it assembled. As we know, Fr Sellers was originally Chaplain, later President of St John XXIII Prep.

Fr Scott Blick, another Ordinariate priest, became Chaplain when Fr Sellers was promoted, Fr Simington assisted there while a deacon, and most recently Fr Mitchican taught there before his priestly ordination and then became Chaplain.

Fr Sellers’ abrupt departure as President probably spelled the end of the school’s cosy relationship with the OCSP. If the congregation had had a significant membership not associated with the school no doubt they would have looked into another worship site.

The fact that this didn’t happen suggests that St Margaret’s was basically a Sunday extension of the school chapel and had no potential as an independent entity.

I think the question is another variation of "What problem are we trying to solve?" My regular correspondent sent me a photo from Facebook that shows how the worship space was arranged at the time the group started in 2015.

As my correspondent puts it,

No kneelers, no altar rail, altar appears to be set up in like that in St Peter’s in Rome, where the celebrant peers through the candles and the crucifix at the congregation, although not for the same reason, judging by the direction of the sunshine.

Beyond that,

Fr Sellers began the process of forming St Margaret by contacting “200 families” of former parishioners for a series of eight organisational meetings in a very long process that led to a modest beginning that stayed pretty modest.

Fr Sellers’ decision to provide congregational music on the guitar, with his wife accompanying him on keyboard, probably meant that the community was not a draw for the Trad crowd in chapel veils.

His tenure as unpaid Director of Communications for the OCSP, then as Director of Schools, of which there were none at the time, was unproductive, to put it charitably.

His initial chaplain’s job at St John XXIII clearly a handout from Cardinal DiNardo, whose brother-in-law was President of the school at the time. He is now officially retired from the OCSP, although he is not canonical retirement age [we think about 68], and continues to minister in the local diocese.

It's hard to avoid thinking that nobody thought this through beyond seeing a need to find a job for Fr Sellers, a member of the old Steenson clique. The tone deafness here is astonishing. If Mr Jesserer Smith is still interested in lessons to draw, the first one might be that you don't look to existing elites to make a success of something new. But there are others.

One is simply the pattern of failure in so many ordinariate startups. If there's a secret, it must be very well kept. However, I think one factor that probably does lead to success is having sufficient money to create something like the ordinariates' selling point, a high-church style worship space, liturgy, and music. If the organizers can't make a start that shows the promise of something like that emerging in the medium term, the effort isn't worth it.

Another issue Mr Jesserer Smith might want to bring up with himself is whether it's a responsible move to keep trying to promote such marginal, unstable efforts. If these things won't last more than five years or so, isn't it delaying the spiritual growth of the few dozen members -- including the Jesserer Smith family -- when they might be making more productive use of their time, talent, and treasure at a perfectly fine diocesan parish far closer to home?

US Supreme Court Status Update Saturday Morning

I posted yesterday on the status of two applications to the US Supreme Court for injunctive relief by Pentecostal and Evangelical parishes in Illinois and California, based on restrictive orders by the states' governors.

Liberty Counsel posted this update for the Illinois parishes as of last night:

The U.S. Supreme Court has chosen not to give an opinion on behalf of Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church and Logos Baptist Ministries since Governor J.B. Pritzker removed all restrictions on churches and houses of worship in Illinois last night.

Justice Kavanaugh “referred to the Court” for the motion for emergency injunction, meaning the case was considered by all nine Justices. The High Court stated, “The Illinois Department of Public Health issued new guidance on May 28. The denial is without prejudice to Applicants filing a new motion for appropriate relief if circumstances warrant.” In other words, the Court did not deny the motion based on the merits, but instead that the door remains open if Illinois imposes restrictions on houses of worship.

. . . Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “We are pleased that now there are no restrictions on houses of worship in Illinois. The Supreme Court made clear that if Gov. Pritzker changes course and reimposes restrictions on houses of worship, the doors of the Court remain open. The governor’s orders have been unconstitutional from the moment they were issued. It’s unfortunate that we had to drag Gov. Pritzker kicking and screaming to the High Court in order to make him remove these unconstitutional restrictions. Now justice has prevailed. This is a shot across the bow to any governors that if they violate the First Amendment right of houses of worship, the Supreme Court is watching and ready to remedy these unconstitutional actions.”

This is probably an appropriate move by the court, since the reason for injunctive relief is to remove an immediate harm to the plaintiff, and Gov Pritzker in fact removed this harm. The court has said that if the harm returns, the churches may reapply for relief.

The petition from the South Bay United Pentecostal Church in California is a slightly different matter, since although Gov Newsom issued relaxed restrictions for churches, they do continue and can at least theoretically be enforced.

As far as I can tell, almost every state has issued enforceable "guidelines for houses of worship" that impose additional requirements over and above restrictions for other, similar indoor activities, such as arenas and auditoriums. In some cases, they try to find ways to forbid communion in any form. The whole idea of separate "guidelines for houses of worship" issued by a state authority raises constitutional issues that could potentially be addressed in a case like this.

I received the following e-mail from the Thomas More Society, which is sponsoring that church's appeal, at 6:15 last night:

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ordered California to file its response to our petition by Thursday evening, so we know they are considering our petition. Now we are waiting to learn whether they will give us relief tonight or tomorrow – or ever.

So far, I haven't found any reference to the California petition's current status on the web. This went via Justice Kagan rather than Justice Kavanaugh, so it is apparently following a somewhat different path.

What's frustrating is that even though prominent bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and William A Jacobson are constitutional law professors, of all things, they've taken no interest in these cases, and the mainstream outlets have taken even less. Constitutional law professors at prestigious universities are, of course, members of the privileged elite, no matter how they profess they aren't.

UPDATE: The court rejected the request, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the liberal majority:

A divided supreme court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal by a California church that challenged state limits on attendance at services that have been imposed to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Over the dissent of the four more conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberals in turning away a request from the South Bay United Pentecostal church in Chula Vista, California, in the San Diego area.

. . . Roberts wrote in a brief opinion that the restriction allowing churches to reopen at 25% of their capacity, with no more than 100 worshipers at a time, “appears consistent” with the first amendment.

Roberts said similar or more severe limits apply to concerts, movies and sporting events “where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time”.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in dissent that the restriction “discriminates against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses. Such discrimination violates the first amendment.”

UPDATE: On further reflection, what happened here took place over the space of a week, and it boils down to two governors backing down on prohibitions against in-person celebrations, or highly restrictive provisions, in he face of appeals to the US Supreme Court. In both cases, the governors relaxed provisions to the extent that, in their judgment, the court would see fit to kick the can down the road. Their judgment turned out to be correct. But the bottom line is that secular authorities so far are recognizing they are vulnerable to legal redress, at least past a certain point.

In a similar circumstance, Howard County, MD sought effectively to prohibit communion in church services, but backed down after two days in response to concerns from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore.

UPDATE: On yet further reflection, it seems to me that the attorneys for the churches got their clients what they needed in a highly successful strategy. The churches started the litigation unable to have in-person services, saying they were willing to abide by state regulations if they were able to have them. Under the threat of a Supreme Court case that could force the governors' hands, the governors backed down, and the churches got the ability to celebrate in-person services under the constraints they said they would accept.

Some people clearly hoped for a landmark Supreme Court action of some sort. But I don't see the court making a landmark ruling based on a week-old set of circumstances. The bottom line is that civil authorities see the downside of trying to restrict church services.