I keep thinking about the subculture I inhabited so happily as a newlywed and new Catholic. We loved JP2. We had all learned NFP from the same CCL teaching couple. We got together for potlucks and board games and Bible studies. We wanted lots of babies and we thought we might homeschool them. I think if our bishop had told us we needed to attend Mass wearing purple polka-dots, we would have complied cheerfully. ("It's liturgically appropriate," I imagine my 1994 self saying with a knowing nod, "to acknowledge our ongoing need for penance." "It represents our call to metanoia!" she might have told one of her friends on the other side of the dressing room divider, on their quest for just-right purple polka-dot dresses.)
You guys, what happened to us?
I am watching the conversations among folks in my town about mass attendance in a pandemic, and I am reading that masks are unnecessary and, because of the summer weather, unsafe. Unsafe, I ask you. The churches are saying clearly on their websites, in response to the bishop's clear directive, that the faithful need to wear masks at church. And the same people who would never dream of disobeying the bishop about their birth control choices are trading ideas about how they can disobey his instructions on masks.
The people in my town who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 have been missing Mass just as much as the rest of us. I am totally baffled by this idea that we have some kind of right to broadcast our respiratory droplets, so that it becomes more dangerous for them to attend Mass. Should they have to choose between physical health and spiritual health because we'd prefer to attend Mass with bare faces?
Some of the same people who complain about "virtue-signaling" on the "loony left" are swapping notes on where to receive communion on the tongue. And as strongly as I prefer to receive on the tongue, I acknowledge that it is an excellent strategy for driving up R0. Is it not bizarrely inconsistent to agree smugly with the bishop when he says "no liturgical dance" and disagree sneakily when he says "no communion on the tongue FOR THE SAKE OF THE VULNERABLE AMONG US, including your priests and EMs"? Liturgical preferences that lead a person to disobedience have an idolatrous flavor. And do you know, as much as I might find liturgical dance disagreeable, it is never going to kill the medically fragile among us.
In my mid-90s circle of friends we were so worried about vulnerable embryos. We would have been aghast if someone had said, "Well, you know, about a quarter of the babies that are aborted would have been miscarried anyway, so I don't think we should make too much of a fuss about abortion." I am having the same reaction to people who are contemplating a surge in COVID-19 deaths among the elderly and vulnerable in our community -- contemplating, let's be clear, the likelihood that they will die separated from their loved ones, drowning alone in their own respiratory goop -- and say, "Well, you know, we're all going to die sometime, so let's not make too much of a fuss about COVID-19."
You can believe wholeheartedly that equanimity in the face of death is a Christian virtue worth cultivating, and -- at the same time! -- that the elderly and medically fragile folks in your parish are living lives worthy of protection. You can believe that even if it means you have to wear a mask on a hot day.
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