What did your Parish Do for Corpus Christi?

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edward_george1

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I’m curious to see what other parishes are doing to celebrate the feast, as we are getting into varying degrees of reopening in different places.

My parish is large, with about 2000 families, in an urban area in the Southeast of the US. We are currently only offering 4 public Masses on the weekend, as opposed to the usual 6. Attendance is capped at 200, about 30% capacity in the building. We’re yet to have anywhere near that many, with most Masses having about 120-150.

Because we have more room in the schedule, we were able to do a Eucharistic procession after each Mass this weekend, and we had great participation. About 80-90% of the people at each Mass stayed for the procession.

What, if anything, did your parish do to celebrate the feast? It might be helpful for reference to know what size your parish is and what your schedule looks like at the moment.

-Fr ACEGC
 
We are still in semi-lockdown. Yesterday (Sat) they did a ‘trial run’ Mass with only 10 people allowed to attend. Today no public Mass but only a morning of Adoration. A pretty sad Corpus Domini Feast…

PS. Size of the parish about 1500+ families
East Coast suburban area
 
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Medium Midwestern urban parish with 3 weekend Masses with limited attendance at the moment. At noon today, our priests walked a mile around the neighborhood in procession, as many lined the sidewalks and/or sat on their porches for a blessing. Lots of people out biking and walking wondered what was going on. A good evangelization event!
 
We are still in a semi-lockdown; churches, along with a whole host of tohers are limited to 25.

However, my parish also has video capabilities, so we had Masses (2 Saturday evening) and 2 today); a total of 25 in the church proper;, another 25 in the vestibule; and 25 more at each of two other rooms in a separate building to accommodate a maximum of 100 including priests and necessary staff. Communion is distributed to all.
 
Here in BC 50 people is currently the max under health authority guidelines. As such, our parish has added a fourth Sunday Mass to accommodate more people (normally Saturday and two Sunday morning - now also Sunday evening). I’m not sure if there was a procession as sadly I was not among the blessed 50 for any of today’s Masses (you have to pre-register). I was, however, able to attend our usual Saturday morning Latin Novus Ordo Mass and receive yesterday - there were perhaps 30 people.
 
My parish has one OF and two EF Masses on Sundays. Father added the second EF Mass when we reopened this month. We are limited to 50% capacity in the church which is 70 people. Online registration is required. Overflow people can listen to Mass on speakers outside. We had processions at one EF Mass and at the OF Mass. there was an overflow crowd at all three Masses.
 
We had a special Corpus Christi benediction and procession through the parking lot. It was one procession, held in the afternoon when all the Masses except the 5:15 pm were over. I’d say maybe 70 people attended.

This is the first time this particular church has had a procession in recent memory. It’s about 2000 families, has 5 Masses for Sunday and Sat vigil, one of which is Spanish language.

In recent years I’ve been to two other nearby churches (one has about 2000 families and the other has maybe 4000) where they have a lengthy procession all over their very large campuses which include a big church, rectory, school, and at one church, nursing home. But this church close by me is 250 years old and in a small city so it only has a medium size parking lot and that’s it, no campus. I also don’t think the previous pastor was into Corpus Christi processions. We have a new one and I believe this is his first feast, plus he invited anyone who wanted to just come and sit in their car to watch also, though most of us got out and joined the procession.

I think it’s great to have a procession. One gets a plenary for being in the procession, so that is also helpful to me.
I’ve been to more ethnic neighborhoods in non-COVID times where the procession still goes through the whole neighborhood and stops at the yards of a few parishioners. I wouldn’t recommend that when we’re social distancing though because it gets very crowded on the sidewalk.
 
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My church opens next week but the diocese Cathedral opened yesterday for public mass and I watched this online and they did they long Sequence between the 2nd reading and the gospel.

My parish is the biggest in the diocese with over 2,000 families and they are opening next Sunday
 
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We are rural, and our priest is pastor of 3 parishes and says one mass per parish— one on Saturday and two on Sunday.

We have some pretty strict guidelines from the diocese, including that we may only have public Sunday masses and no public weekday masses or any other events. We can have 25% capacity in the church, and we have a whole lot of rules to follow. We aren’t supposed to have processions or anything other than mass— and no parking lot masses or drive by communion, etc.

We had mass, and that was it.
 
My parish due to capacity has resumed normal happenings, 2 masses on Sundays, daily Mass and confession before all masses, 30 mins before. For Corpus they did a second mass. I haven’t been to any since I am concerned over the virus. We have around 200 families, and on a normal Sunday maybe 100-70 people would come, more on the big days. It is FSSP. No restrictions on amount of people who can come since we don’t have a ton anyway. The only difference is to enter one side, exit the other, use sanitizer and disinfect where you’ve been, and don’t crowd close to others not of your household. No handing out bulletins, no books in the pews, no items in the vestibule to pick up.

I need to get to confession though, although I’ll hate it.
 
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We are in the first phase of reopening in our diocese–only daily masses are allowed to be public, and they must be at limited capacities. So for Corpus Christi my Parish simply streamed mass like normal, but there was a neighboring Parish that did a Eucharistic procession with a line of cars following behind!
 
We usually do a full mile procession through downtown. This year it was limited to processing around the parish grounds.
 
Just the regular masses this morning that you had to sign up to attend due to limited capacity. No processions, but the parish has never done them before Covid either, unfortunately.
 
We only had Mass. I live in a majority Protestant Swiss state and processions are forbidden since the Reformation anyways, except in one single village which is mainly Catholic.

Adoration isn’t back here yet. The wildest thing we had yesterday was the complete Gregorian sequence.
 
Our parish had a Eucharistic procession after one of the Masses. Masks were handed out to everyone. I’d say there were probably around 100 or more people in profession. My first time participating and it was beautiful!
 
We had a procession around the block after the 11am Mass (we have two Sunday masses).

Half way through the procession was a plot of land owned by the parish. A tent with altar was set up there for a mid procession blessing.

Then we finished the procession and ended with benediction back in the Church.

Almost everyone went on the procession, but only about half came back in the church afterwards

Most likely around 250 or 300 for mass & procession.

Note: in our Archdiocese, churches are allowed to be open upto 50% seating capacity
 
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We had two daily Masses and adoration the entire day last Thursday (I’m assuming Corpus Christi was moved to Sunday in the OF).

We can only have 25% capacity so Sunday Mass is by signup based on first letter of your last name. Weekday Mass is first come first serve. They added a 6th Mass on Sundays, and we have 2 every day. The priests are doing what the can. We have a small building that seats around 240, that we’ve outgrown even before covid, so it’s hard to get people in with social distancing. The parish size is about 1000 (communicants, not families).
 
1000 families

We used the day to celebrate First Communions, which had been postponed.
 
We are a parish of 200 families between two churches. We have one vigil Mass at the smaller church and one Sunday morning Mass at the larger one, with daily Masses split between the two. We are currently allowed 25% capacity at each church. We are also allowed to sing, just not “vigorously.”

In the past we have processed throughout different neighborhoods, but this year Father wanted to sanctify our own space, so we had a procession around the perimeter of the larger property after the Sunday Mass. About 50% of the people at Mass stayed for the procession. Musicians led some simple singing, but (which is typical for the larger church) many people didn’t sing.

One of our young men is currently home from film school and started a YouTube channel for us during the shutdown. He made a beautiful video recap of the procession.
 
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