I went to Mass this morning, and you probably couldn't. So I'll tell you about it.
Our governor, considering the best available advice (the kind that comes from The Don) is opening Florida as fast as he can. For one thing, Rudy Guilliani is delinquent in property tax on his Palm Beach condo; we had to get people back to work to dun him. In keeping with the spirit of everything, our bishops are reopening the churches.
On Monday weekday Masses started, and this Sunday, y'all come but stay six feet apart and please, please, please observe social distance. (OK, we know you won't observe social distance, but we are required to ask.)
I didn't return Monday because it was Memorial Day and first Mass since March 19, so a crowd was likely. Only forty showed up, I am told. I missed Tuesday because of my grocery shopping hour, and Wednesday because of the men's group. So today was the day.
It was different, but not that different. Every other pew had a rope across the entrance and a sign explaining why. Thursday attendance usually has been the lowest of the week. There were 27 of us today, about half or an ordinary Thursday. We were all sitting at the ends of unblocked pews, except for three people from Century Village (over-55 community) who came together and sat together. That is OK under the rules. We all wore masks.
It is hard to sing with a mask on.
At Communion Deacon Pete read a prepared statement recommending reception in the hand and asking people who want to receive on the tongue anyway to wait until last. Pete tells the mouth-takers are pretty much ignoring the request. They are supposed to receive from the kamikazi priest. But Father George sat down, and Pete had to risk seppuku.
The rest of us received in two hands and then used one to raise or lower our masked. The raisers and lowerers seemed to be about 50-50.
We did better than I am told is usual at maintaining distance leaving church.
There was a Mass, but it had strong elements of learning to color between the lines. I am in no hurry to try it with a full house of one-third the usual Sunday Mass crowd while the state teeters on the edge of a surge (and Rudy isn't answering his phone). I told the pastor last week that he'll see me on a Sunday sometime in October.
HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: I wrote this on the new, revised Blogger page format, which I think the old one says will become mandatory in June some time. If you hit the red "try it" button on the left side of the old screen, you will end up here and probably never get back. At lease I can't.
Saturday evening will be our parish's first time. The rules came out in the bulletin, yours sound pretty similar to ours. I don't expect any problems with everyone receiving Communion in the hand; the parish are Polish and German rule followers (I am neither, but have no problem following these kind of rules.) Everyone is asked to wear a mask.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of masks, I wore my KN95 one yesterday for 7:00 AM senior hour at the grocery store. I noticed that unless I consciously increased my rate of breathing I would get a bit light-headed. Just out of curiosity when I got home I checked with the oximeter when wearing the mask and found that my O2 sat was in the mid 80s. Don't know if I had the kind with the valve if that would make a difference. The cloth kind or disposable surgical masks are no problem that way. But the N95 and KN95s provide more effective protection.
Chicago is still lagging behind. As far as I know, no re-opening announced yet for mass. The scuttlebutt is it may not happen during June, but that's not official.
DeleteBased on the layout of our church, the bottlenecks will be the communion line and exiting.
DeleteThe wildcards will be the parishioners who think wearing masks and bringing their own sanitizer is giving in to a hoax, and how well volunteers sanitize areas after Mass.
Tom, many thanks for that report. Masks up vs. masks down is the kind of detail we all crave - or at least I do :-).
ReplyDeleteI don't get a new Blogger option at present. Maybe my version of Chrome is too old or something.
From what I read before I impulsively pushed the button to "see" what it was all about, it will become mandatory. What I got was a whole different opening page. And the tools for writing a post are all moved around with different icons. The little eye icon that's everywhere is what you have to click on to read anything. I rarely like anything new (Chicago's Picasso was such a notable exception that people still talk about how quickly I deemed it OK), so I am trying to reserve judgment.
DeleteI hate it when they move my cheese! Especially if the previous system was working for me.
DeleteBtw, inasmuch as masks down would expose both nose and mouth, whereas masks up may expose only the mouth (at least if done thoughtfully), masks up seems the more courteous, and possibly safe, approach.
DeleteIf you have a type of mask that is of more or less stiff construction, neither up nor down is going to work very well. When I practiced with mine, releasing one ear loop and letting it dangle by the other seemed to work best. It was relatively easy to get the ear loop back in place.
DeleteWhen it finally came down to the decision, I moved the mask up because that seemed easier one-handed. Mask type may make more of a difference than personal preference, though.
DeleteI should have mentoned the celebrant, deacon were unmasked. Te acolyte was masked until he reached the altar, when the took it off. The deacon put on a mask to distribute communion
For those who are hard of hearing, being able to see the lips and face of the speaker is critical. For that reason, I believe anyone who has a speaking role in liturgy needs to do it without a mask. Naturally, we need to find ways to do that which mitigate risk as much as possible.
DeleteFor the lector and deacon to drop the mask while doing the readings seems like it would be pretty minimal exposure from either side, since they are standing a good distance away from the congregation. However if someone who is hearing impaired has a smart phone, they could follow the readings on the USCCB site. I know it sounds like a contradiction for a hearing impaired person to use a smart phone, but I think a lot of them use it for texting.
DeleteJim, the help provided by face to face lip-reading only works with a very BIG screen or being very close to the speaker, at least for those with a severe hearing loss like my own. Lip-reading is a help in face-to-face conversation up close, but it's not enough, especially in a large place like a church where the speaker is - at minimum - several yards away.
DeleteParishes that are truly concerned about those with hearing loss should invest in a few hearing assistive devices.
Every Episcopal Church we have attended in recent years - without exception - locally and when visiting other cities and towns, provides hearing assistive devices. Most of these parishes are quite small, and have much smaller budgets than the average large RC parish. If they can do it, yours can too.
The other thing the EC parishes do that seems to have disappeared from Catholic churches (we sometimes go to those when visiting still Catholic family members) is provide a typed folded guide to the day's liturgy - what my good friend the RC liturgy expert calls a "worship aid" (she spent years teaching liturgy to deacon candidates and to parish liturgy teams). I gather from her that someone had the very mis-guided notion that "worship aids" are a bad thing, and so they were done away with.
Those in EC parishes have all the readings, all the prayers (collect, creed, OT, NT,Gospel, responses etc), provides the music for the psalms (always sung,with the congregation joining in for the "chorus"), and music for any hymns that aren't in the hymnal (otherwise they print the hymn number and page in the hymnal) etc. The only spoken part of the liturgy that is not included in this is the homily. That's where the assistive devices come in.
A more expensive solution is "looping' the church so that the mics stream directly to the hearing aids of those in the congregation who have modern hearing aids.
Depending on the size of the congregation, this could be a better solution than individual devices - more expensive in the short-run, but cheaper in the long run.
Paper worship guides are also relatively inexpensive. I would not join any church that does not provide BOTH written worship guides and assistive devices for hearing.
I have no problem with TV streamed worship because it streams directly to my hearing aids, and if the person giving the reading or homily mumbles or has a strong foreign accent (as many RC priests do these days), I can turn on closed captions. Much better than sitting in a pew and reading the Book of Common Prayer on my own. The Book of Common Prayer is also a big improvement on the hard-backed mass books I find in Catholic pews. Very hard to find what I need in those.
Fumbling with a phone during liturgy to read the OT, NT readings and gospels would be a pain. Many older people, those most likely to have hearing loss, don't even own smartphones. The tiny screens make reading hard. And it doesn't solve the problem of understanding the words of the homilist.
It is not news that young people are dropping out of regular church attendance in droves, and that ever increasing percentages of every congregation have gray hair. If some kind of hearing assistance isn't available at the local parish, more of the gray-haired people might just decide to stay home on Sunday and watch mass on TV - especially as now they have been forced into learning how this works.
For more information on this:
https://easychurchtech.com/best-assisted-listening-devices-for-churches/
https://assist2hear.com/hearing-loop-systems-in-churches/
Most of the time it seems like missalettes are pretty easy to use. Of course now they got rid of them because you can't sanitize them. Back in the 80s liturgists went through a phase of throwing out missalettes and worship aids because the Word was supposed to be a "heard" experience. But not everyone processes things the same. I'm not hearing impaired, but I process things visually and found the liturgical hobby horses annoying.
DeleteKatherine, I remember the missalettes. I am also a visual person and used them even when I could still hear. None of the RC churches around here have them. I also haven't seen them in the several RC churches we have gone to in California when we visit family there. I am truly surprised to learn that your churches started using them again. All of them should - every parish, everywhere.
DeleteFrom occasionally reading the Pray, Tell blog that Jim once made known to those here, I see that a whole lot of liturgy nuts are part of the no written guides crowd. The readings must be "proclaimed "!!!
We had missalettes, but of course we won't use them for the duration. We had earphones tuned to the altar mics. When we phased them out, most of them had "walked out of church" even though they wouldn't work anyplace else. To replace them, we got an AV system that projects hymns and readings (and backup material for any homilist who is creative enough to use it) in large letters on both sides of the altar.
DeleteI don't really like the AV, but at our bilingual noon Mass, where I usually ush, the AV shows the translation of whatever is being read aloud. I don't know of any better way to handle that.
Ye, printed worship aids are convenient. They kill a lot of trees, though. But we're living in a time where some of those considerations are being set aside.
DeleteI prefer projection or broadcast onto big screens rather than a ream of individual worship aids. I guess they also can be broadcast to cell phones now, too. But I'm sure I'm in the minority on this. That's okay, that's my usual position on church committees, too :-).
Anne, just FYI, our parish has the looping technology you describe for the hearing-impaired - in fact, it has had both types of technology at various times over the years. I think most of the parishes do in this suburban area. We also had a signer at one time.
To each his own. I really don’t like big screens in churches. Total turnoff - but that’s just me. Of course more paper involved in the kind of worship aid our small EC church uses than in a huge RC parish. Bring back the missalettes maybe. Or maybe just print up a couple of dozen and notify the congregation that they are available on request from an usher.
DeleteI have never been to a church that is looped. Your diocese is very advanced! Did you have a bishop or pastor with severe hearing loss at some point?
I have been told that one of the EC parishes not far from here has a loop system but I haven’t tried it. All the the other EC churches around here that I have been to use the individual devices.
Tom, a bunch of kleptos in your parish? Our small EC parish has 3 services on Sunday. The earliest, no music, had a small, dedicated group. The family liturgy has the most people. We went to the latest liturgy, which is Rite l which has more classical mass music, often in Latin. ;) Few kids at that one. Maybe 400 people spread out over three liturgies. Three devices. Over the ten years we have been there, not a single device walked out of the church. Not the latest model, but they work just fine.
Tom, a bunch of kleptos in your parish? New Yorkers. The snowbirds come in the fall, around Thanksgiving, and a bunch of hymnals disappear. They go back up north after Easter, and clusters of hymnals reappear. The earphones just were not worth returning.
DeleteWhen google+ disappeared I couldn’t use the system. After a lot of trial and error and creating new email addresses for approval I was able to get on again, but using workarounds. I comment using chrome and write posts on Firefox or safari. Or vice versus. I’ll probably hit a new wall with another change.
ReplyDeleteAnne, If I am using it, anybody can. (But I see a lot of drawbacks vis-a-vis...oh, I am keeping an open mind.)
DeleteMaybe, Tom. But you weren't kicked off the system with the google+ change. I hope you are right.
DeleteRain stopped yet?
The rain eased up. It's supposed to come back over the weekend. What we got out of this week so far is mosquitoes.
DeleteBishop Boyea has now lifted the obligation to attend Mass until September (pace those who don't like "obligation"). Pews will be roped off and floor markings added to facilitate social distancing. Take your own temps before Mass. Don't come if it's over 100. BYO sanitizer and masks. No singing or passing the peace. Wafers only. Disposable missals. Dismissal by pews. Receiving on tongue OK, but priest has to sanitize before and after. Sounds reasonable unless the Trumpers decide to get belligerent.
ReplyDeleteThe local priest has asked the elderly to stay away, but I am encouraging Raber to attend. He is mopey and angry without church.
I mentioned before that I had already told my choir leaders
Deletethat I would wait awhile before rejoining them. It seems they hit a speed bump in their plans to sing this Sunday. The pastor and the archdiocese are throwing a caution flag. I'll let them sort it out.