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Tagged: pandemic

Encountering Christ the Consoler

As Lent 2021 began, many joked that they felt the penitential season had not ended since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. While well-meaning, this humor belies the profound stress, change, fear, sickness, and loss that has transpired...

Stop Berating the Laity Over In-Person Mass

I’ve often thought about the benefits of a seminary program where aspiring priests would be required to spend a semester helping a family get ready for Sunday Mass every week. If nothing else, the experience would hopefully help our clergy...

Still, A Time to Give Thanks

This has been a Thanksgiving like no other. A national holiday that we otherwise celebrate with abandon is being observed with utmost caution, restraint, devoid of large family gatherings, and perhaps, even alone. A pandemic Thanksgiving – it almost sounds...

Conscience and the Sunday Obligation

When the pandemic hit the United States earlier this year, bishops across the country made the necessary but unprecedented decision to dispense the faithful from their traditional obligation to attend Mass every Sunday. Six months later, we are slowly beginning...

The Ongoing Pandemic of Child Abuse

The COVID-19 pandemic is easing in some areas, increasing elsewhere, and settling into an ongoing reality everywhere. At the same time, the United States is facing a reckoning with our terrible legacy of racism following the killing of George Floyd...

You are your Brother’s Keeper

Across the country, bishops are gradually beginning to allow public Masses again. This process will be slow-going, and the dioceses that are reopening have extended the dispensation of the faithful from their obligation to attend Sunday Mass. How public liturgies...