Voices February 04, 2021
Projecting fear and closing churches
By Paul Schratz - Life In The Schratz Lane
With no end in sight to the B.C. government’s church closings, it’s hard to say what’s more frustrating: the lack of justification for the ban, or that so few people care.
B.C.’s COVID czars – Dr. Bonnie Henry, Health Minister Adrian Dix, and Premier John Horgan – have yet to explain why houses of worship are closed. But kudos to the Catholic school students who interviewed Henry recently and asked her to explain the contradiction between closed churches and open restaurants and stores.
Unfortunately, the students deserved a better answer than the one Henry provided.
Restaurants, she said, involve “a small group of people that are related to each other, who sit at one table with barriers and masks. That makes it a much different situation than a church service, for example. Same with a retail store. It’s a very qualitatively different experience to go and stand in a line and buy some groceries …”
Anyone who has been in an eating or shopping establishment lately knows Henry’s response is absurd. I’ve been in a restaurant filled with unmasked people from different households who were physically distanced from strangers by mere inches. There were no protective barriers. I’ve seen hundreds of people waiting to enter a store, the lineup snaking back and forth like an airport security queue.
Henry’s description of safe spaces more accurately applied to churches when they were open. Parishioners – usually members of one family – made reservations and were checked in and sanitized before going to their assigned place in the church. They wore masks, were distanced by metres in alternating pews, and sanitized their pews upon leaving through separate doors.
If you point that out to some people, be prepared to get slammed for endangering people’s lives and not being grateful you can still worship in your home.
Unfortunately many Christians feel the same way. I’m indebted to reader Marianne Werner for drawing my attention to a poll suggesting more than 80 per cent of British Columbians, and an equivalent percentage of Christians, support the province’s church ban. In a bizarre twist, agnostics and those without religion were more critical of the ban than Christians were.
The director of the survey firm summed up what people are thinking: “Yes, there might be somebody who might want to go to church on Sunday, but if (for example) that is going to create 300 to 500 new cases in my community then that is not something I want to support.’”
That’s the same type of fear projection the government is making use of, ignoring the fact British Columbians going to church on Sunday hasn’t led to hundreds of cases, or even one that we’re aware of.
It’s evident the government lacks an appreciation for religion and its role in society, an issue that was front and centre Thursday when Archbishop J. Michael Miller observed the first International Day of Human Fraternity. Offering Mass for the “fraternity and social friendship” the Pope called for in his encyclical Fratelli tutti, the archbishop noted human solidarity is not “an abstract idea” but must find “concrete embodiment in our practical affairs.”
He prayed that people of different religions, cultures, traditions, and beliefs will focus on love of neighbour as a core conviction they hold in common. “There is no alternative, Pope Francis affirms,” the archbishop said. “We will either build a future there, or there will be no future for us.
Religion has a vital role in building bridges between peoples and cultures, the archbishop said.
It’s a message each of us needs to declare as we affirm our place in society, a place that is not second to stores and restaurants.
This weekend is the annual Catholic Press Collection, which helps parishes defray their costs of sending The B.C. Catholic to parishioners.
I reached out to several pastors who are strong supporters of this newspaper and asked whether the collection covers their costs. From what they told me, the success of the collection may have a lot to do with the pastor’s enthusiasm for the newspaper.
Depending on the parish, the collection can cover anywhere from a third to three-quarters of their B.C. Catholic expenses.
At one parish where the collection pays for 75 per cent of subscription costs, the pastor said he has supported The B.C. Catholic at every parish where he’s been assigned. “So, I’ve been on your side for a long time,” he said.
Despite the collection’s success, “it never covers the cost that the parish incurs,” which means the parish has to subsidize the remaining subscriptions at a cost of several thousand dollars a year.
His commitment to the newspaper, however, “is rooted in my belief that this is a very practical means of evangelizing our parishioners.” Describing The B.C. Catholic as “a kind of coffee table evangelism at the family level,” he encourages his brother priests to view the expense “as a form of investment in the faith formation of our people.”
He also suggests pastors offer a complimentary year’s subscription to all new parishioners as a gesture of welcome, which would certainly make for a concrete expression of fraternity and solidarity at the local level.
To donate to the Catholic Press Collection at your parish, visit support.rcav.org/parishes/second-collections.