Attending Mass - There is a Way! Out-of-date Fr. Zed post

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I’m sorry, but I just think this is such a bad idea.

Our public masses are not being cancelled due to government anti-religion sentiments. There is a global pandemic going on, people.

My grandmother told me about her experiences during the Spanish influenza in 1918. Public masses ceased then, too, and the faithful prayed their rosaries and made other devotions until they were allowed to participate fully in the mass once again.

We need to stop making this about us, and what we want. Sometimes God asks sacrifice of us, and yes, that could even mean the sacrifice of not being able to attend mass in person.

Though praying the mass via a television broadcast or online streaming does not satisfy the obligation to attend Sunday mass (nor holy days of obligation), our prayers are, nonetheless, still united to the holy sacrifice of the mass being offered by the priest. Our prayers are still efficacious, and we can still make a spiritual communion.

It is, in my opinion, complete rubbish to encourage people to risk getting infected or spreading infection at this time. If God calls us to martyrdom, fine. But we should not go looking for it for ourselves, or casting it upon others (if we infect someone else), particularly in defiance of our Bishops when they stand in agreement with civil and medical authorities.

Just my two cents. 🙏 Stay healthy and strong, peeps. We are Light and Salt in these difficult times – seek out someone in need and be Christ to them.
 
First, that article was put out on March 15. There have been changes enough since then that in most dioceses the Masses have been suspended. So the whole point is moot.

And Father Z did not encourage people to sneak in. Or to defy the law which at the time of March 15 in most places limited gatherings to (depending on the place) 50 to 200 or so people.

It’s good to link full articles, but when commenting on those articles we need to be sure we address the whole article, note if things have changed since then, and not just respond to ‘the headlines’ which are often quite different from the entire article itself.
 
There’s a global pandemic of fear, more than anything. Even in China with their massively dense population, the infection rate was only 0.005% of their population. Their death rate was 4% of that, not 30% or 70%, corresponding to a 1/500,000 chance of any given person becoming a fatality. China didn’t even start their interventions as early as other countries. They had everything going against them. The infections and deaths are also very sharply skewed in the direction of affecting only those of advanced age or pre-existing complications. The nice thing is that it is easy to know if you are at risk. There is nothing wrong with taking precautions. Those that are at risk themselves, or minister to/interact with those that are, should take precautions. Dispensing the faithful was probably a good decision to allow people to do this.

You can’t shut down an entire country simply because of a potential that 0.0002% of the population might die. It’s not going to happen in the economy (I hope); there are still going to be people out there 5 days a week working. The action recommended in the article is not going to put people at any greater risk. You mention gatherings not being larger than 50-200 people. It is entirely possible for a few people to privately show up throughout the day without any risk of going over this limit. They can still take common-sense precautions. No “sign-of-peace” nonsense, keep several pews distance, washing hands before and after going out, etc. To say that the 1-4hrs hours that any average individual might spend inside a church in a week is going to increase the risk greatly beyond the 40hrs spent at work for those lucky to still be working seems absurd. The spiritual is also more important than the material. The whole thing has been taken out of proportion.

Alright, now shoot me.
 
stpurl said:
First, that article was put out on March 15. There have been changes enough since then that in most dioceses the Masses have been suspended. So the whole point is moot.

And Father Z did not encourage people to sneak in. Or to defy the law which at the time of March 15 in most places limited gatherings to (depending on the place) 50 to 200 or so people.

It’s good to link full articles, but when commenting on those articles we need to be sure we address the whole article, note if things have changed since then, and not just respond to ‘the headlines’ which are often quite different from the entire article itself.
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This highlights of the imprudence of blurting for the sake of blurting. This Priest has stirred up people for no good reason. I hope he has learned a lesson in prudent speech from this.
 
You misunderstand. Father Z did not ‘blurt’ anything as you would know if you had read the article through. At the time that he wrote, Masses were allowed to be said and the public was allowed to attend so long as certain DIOCESEAN RULES were adhered to.

The blurting was from those who assumed from the headline that Father was somehow saying, “It doesn’t matter what the diocese says you can still go”.

He did no such thing.

I’d appreciate if you’d withdraw the remark about ‘this priest’ since you were in error assuming HE was the ‘problem.”

Thank you.
 
I’ve changed the headline to reflect that this is an older post that contains no-longer-applicable information.
 
Socrates92 said:
You can’t shut down an entire country simply because of a potential that 0.0002% of the population might die.
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0.0002%? For young people maybe. Do you realize that the Imperial College in London estimates that 2 million could die of this in the US alone?


Your 1/500,000 might be true if diseases spread in a linear fashion. They don’t. They spread exponentially. Here’s a map from John Hopkins regarding the spread of coronavirus. Go take a look at the graphs.

 
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Considering that people who read the article noted that there was absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with Father Z’s advice, perhaps one might want to consider my 90 year old mother’s very timely advice:

If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.

Particularly if you really don’t know what you are commenting about. 😀
 
Socrates92 said:
Even in China with their massively dense population, the infection rate was only 0.005% of their population.
Click to expand...
The infection, as traced so far, started in the city of Wuhan. It has a population of about 11 million; the infection rate was greater than 7 tenths of 1 percent in the area; greater, because true cases are still not known; people with very mild to no symptoms did not report. At least 87,000 cases are known; but that does not include all true cases. True cases are those who are infected but show little or no sign of symptoms; they still can transmit as they are contagious.

From one person sick enough to go to a doctor on December 10th; to 27 known cases (hospitalized) on December 31st; to a statement ion January 14th that there was "no clear evidence of human to human transmission:, to January 23 complete lockdown of Wuhan and three other cities is a case of a clear highly contagious disease. At least two doctors were silenced (and one of them interestingly has “disappeared”). It appears that local authorities were putting the clamp down on any response and the silencing of any perspective; Beijing sent in an epidemiologist on January 19th.

On January 13, Thailand had its first known case ; they now have 322 known cases, which indicates anywhere from 1600 true cases more to possibly 3200. And cases double at 6.2 days; that could mean another 3200 to 6400 next week (they are moving to isolation, so that may slow down some).

What you are ignoring is the number of true cases (those actually infected) as opposed to those identified from a doctor report of hospitalization) While it is true that deaths are primarily restricted to those either elderly or with compromised immune systems, you are ignoring both how rapidly the virus is transmitted and re-transmitted. Someone with the virus is contagious before they show symptoms, which makes tracing difficult. A review of how the virus went through the Kirkland, Washington facility is a prime example why “social distance” and “self quarantine” is constantly being repeated.

It is not an issue of how small the percentage of people in the US might die; it is how many infected will need hospitalization and how many of those will end up in ICU. The potential will crash the medical system here, as it has crashed it in places, for example, in Italy. and when ICU crashes, more will die than if they had a caseload they could respond to. (continued)
 
(continued)

There is no known way of stopping the spread of the virus which is replicating at an exponential rate short of a lockdown. There is no immunization; there are some medications which may, or may not be effective and no known degree of effectiveness, and while private industry is gone overtime in producing tests, they don’t stop contagion; they only identify who already has it. That person might be stopped from infecting others subsequently, but it is a nightmare to try to backtrack all whom they might already have infected. Wuhan and the three cities went into lockdown because finally, Beijing figured out what they had on their hands and went to it within two days.

That has what has flattened - not stopped, but flattened the rate of infection.
 
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Well, there is this:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Since each one of us is a potential asymptomatic carrier of the virus, the charitable thing to so is to obey our Bishops. They have a shepherd’s staff for a reason.
 
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