I do apologise if the way in which I expressed myself was hurtful. I can assure you that I understand how difficult it has been to be unable to worship in the various ways to which we are accustomed. For almost 40 years I have said the Daily Office virtually every day. When I moved to Cambridge, one of my great joys was being able to attend Choral Evensong. Since the beginning of the pandemic, that is something which I have had to sacrifice. Even now that we have resumed worship in church, it is not like it was before. The congregation is greatly reduced, people queue in silence to be allowed into church, they sit spaced widely apart either alone or with members of their household, everybody wears a mask, nobody is allowed to sing, there is no sign of peace. It is a miserable situation, and we all long for the day when normal life returns.
That being said, I do not consider attending public acts of worship to be of paramount importance right now. Our first priority must be to save lives. I honestly do not believe that attending worship, whether that is Catholic Mass or Muslim Friday prayers, is important enough to risk causing death on a large scale. Our second priority must be to preserve the infrastructure of society. The more the virus spreads, the less healthcare systems can cope. First, healthcare systems risk being overwhelmed by patients with coronavirus, but, secondly, there is disruption to the treatment of patients with other conditions. This is the situation in the UK. It may be that in the US, where healthcare is vastly superior, this is not a problem. Our children and young adults have still not returned to fully normal education. Millions of people are unemployed. After years of austerity, public spending is once again spiralling out of control despite vastly reduced income. If people living in the worst affected areas are asked to stay away from their places of worship while we struggle to overcome the worst pandemic for a century combined with a crisis in public services, mass unemployment, and a looming economic disaster, I think that is reasonable.
I would add that in the UK (I know that in many other countries this has not been a problem), we are also suffering because of widespread disregard for the rules imposed. In Cambridge, people are quite law-abiding, but that is not the situation in larger cities where there are flagrant breaches of the law and the police do not have the resources to intervene. Furthermore, although it is unlikely that this will ever be confirmed by official sources, there is strong anecdotal evidence that these breaches are more common in deprived areas and among black people (I am talking about in British cities, not African Americans). Of course, politicians and their staff have also been notable offenders. Nottingham, where Father Palmer is based, is a city in the English Midlands with large areas of poverty, high rates of crime, and a large black community. What sort of message does it send to the rest of the community if a priest, a white man educated at one of the country’s finest public schools and with multiple university degrees, is publicly stating that he intends to break the law?
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