Church life in the post-pandemic world

Over the next few weeks, Catholic churches across the country and around the world are going to start opening up for public Masses again. It’s been a couple of months since we’ve been able to gather, and just like with your local restaurant, bar or small retail shop, churches and dioceses are letting us know what the new normal is going to be like — what social distancing measures they’ll be putting in place to abide by local regulations.

I’ve been looking over many of these new policies as they’ve been released, and what I’m seeing is striking. And, I’m going to admit, because I’m a bad person, entertaining.

Some of the more common features of the New — really New Mass seem to be:

• No touching: No hand-holding at the Lord’s Prayer, which had become a common practice in Catholic churches.
• No shared Sign of Peace. This is an optional moment, positioned right before Communion, in which the peace of Christ, embodied in the presence of Jesus on the altar, is symbolically shared and celebrated between members of the congregation. In the United States, this generally involves handshakes, hugging for the more demonstrative, and peace signs and waves, usually from that old guy two pews up. I do want to mention that touching during this moment is a cultural thing. Two years ago, we went to Mass in Japan, and, as you might expect, the Sign of Peace isn’t shared by touching there, at all — but by bowing. It was awesome.
• No congregational singing. Why? Because of concerns about aspirating the airborne virus. To have hundreds of people spending an hour in a closed space aspirating their way through many hymns and Mass parts would be, apparently risky.
• So any music should be provided by a choir or cantor.
• People should super cautious about receiving Communion.
• No Communion from the shared chalice for the congregation. Congregants maybe don’t take for granted that they will receive, or no Communion distributed during Mass, or only in the hand.
• Maybe even the priest should think about wearing a mask. Because, of course, we want to minimize his breathing and speaking in our direction for an hour in a closed space.
• No socializing before or after Mass. Maintain your distance!

Incidentally, if you’ve been Catholic for longer than ten years or so, you might, like me, experience a bit of schadenfreude at reading all these new rules. Basically, the liturgy experts who have been screeching at us for years to Sing! Louder! Participate! Embrace! Don’t be so quiet! Recognize Jesus in each other, not just in that piece of bread and chat, hug and hang out! Share the cup! Participate! And that means SING! LOUDER!

….yeah, all those people are now put in the position of having to tell us to…be quiet, not touch and no, we don’t share the cup,and yeah, maybe don’t sing.

Anyway…back to the topic at hand.

So, I’m reading through all of these directives as they’re starting to come, and a picture is starting to form:

A Mass where’s there’s a lot more silence. Where social aspects are minimized, people sort of keeping to themselves. A Mass where there’s no touching or hand-holding. There’s no Sign of Peace shared among the congregation. A Mass in which the chalice isn’t distributed to the laity. A Mass where people are discouraged from looking at each other and socializing. A Mass where the members of the congregation don’t sing, but leave it to a choir. A Mass during which the priest is cautious about his contact with the congregation. Maybe he might even face in another direction while he’s praying!

Hmmm. I’m thinking..what would that look like?

…thinking..

…something’s coming….

…I think I can conjure that up…

Hahahaha. Come on. Laugh. You can do it.

It sort of reminds me of a few months back, when a parish in my area started advertising regularly scheduled sensory-friendly Masses. I read about the description of what that would be like, and I thought, “So, a traditional low Mass, right?”

The point about the Mass pictured above is made even more sharply when you understand that it was quite common for Communion to be distributed outside of Mass, during this time. I wrote about that here, in this post on the sociological study, St. Denis — a small Quebec community in which the laity would go to Confession and receive Communion before Mass, and then attend the Mass itself.

Look. Here’s what this is about. It’s about what I point out over and over and over AND OVER.

There is wisdom in tradition.

Traditional practices grew out of human experience — human experiences of joy, sorrow, difficulty and challenge. Human experiences of trying to obey Christ, bring his presence into the world as it is — in peace, war, plenty, famine, health and disease. I wrote a bit about this earlier here. Yes, tradition and traditional practices are always subject to reform and development. But it helps if, as we reform, we keep the wisdom of the tradition in mind and are realistic about life in this world as well.

Short version: Maybe they knew what they were doing, after all.