Here's a list from CNA:
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/do-we-have-mass-coronavirus-closures-and-dispensations-in-us-dioceses-96801

but it's already in need of an update: Tulsa has announced they are suspending public Masses after Thursday.

The list as it stands shows 18 dioceses/archdioceses still offering some Masses accessible to the public, with one exception: in Fort Worth, closed Masses are followed by an outdoor distribution of Holy Communion.

Richard,

Prudence, surely, can't include abandoning our duty to God in the name of preserving our bodies.

Cleveland Diocese doesn't have a Bishop, only an administrator.

No - God does not require us to fulfill our duty at the peril of catching and passing on a disease that has become a pandemic. Even Martin Luther understood this. Below, is an excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1527 when the black plague came to Wittenburg. How surprising it is that there are those in 2020 who don't see this with the clarity of someone living almost 500 years ago...

"Others sin on the right hand. They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so without medicines or our carefulness. This is not trusting God but tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health.

If one makes no use of intelligence or medicine when he could do so without detriment to his neighbor, such a person injures his body and must beware lest he become a suicide in God’s eyes. By the same reasoning a person might forego eat- ing and drinking, clothing and shelter, and boldly proclaim his faith that if God wanted to preserve him from starvation and cold, he could do so without food and clothing. Actually that would be suicide.

It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best he is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have. He is thus responsible before God for his neighbor’s death and is a murderer many times over. Indeed, such people behave as though a house were burning in the city and nobody were trying to put the fire out. Instead they give leeway to the flames so that the whole city is consumed, saying that if God so willed, he could save the city without water to quench the fire.

No, my dear friends, that is no good. Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city. What else is the epidemic but a fire which instead of consuming wood and straw devours life and body?

You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above.

See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God. Moreover, he who has contracted the disease and recovered should keep away from others and not admit them into his presence unless it be necessary. Though one should aid him in his time of need, as previously pointed out, he in turn should, after his recovery, so act toward others that no one becomes unnecessarily endangered on his account and so cause another’s death. “Whoever loves danger,” says the wise man, “will perish by it”

CGZ writes:

yet no calming words are coming from our bishops, about the evils of rash judgment or the need to have confidence in the Almighty and All-merciful God

There are 145 territorial dioceses in the U.S., and they all have websites. I have looked at dozens of them this week, and can say you are mistaken. So rather than spouting lazy, uninformed disparagement of all the bishops, why not use your computer to go and look at the messages the bishops have posted? Some of them are worth listening to.

Yes, and it's not like we can use the Eucharist or other Sacraments like the shield Aegis against the virus. Honestly, thinking that way is juvenile and has nothing to do with our faith. It's the kind of strawman that atheists love to mock.

If you've received a dispensation from competent authority, then you're basically asking to endanger the population so that you can participate above and beyond what the Church itself asks of you. Not being able to attend Mass beyond our obligation is an understandable frustration in my opinion, and one that I share, but not one that warrants a crusade against the USCCB.

Not always. For some sick persons, the obligation to protect other people from illness is a duty that outweighs the benefit of optionally attending Mass.

Chonak,

For what it's worth, I began this thread genuinely hoping for a vehicle to strengthen the faithful bishops in their difficult work. I don't think it's going quite as I intended.

Worthless in that regard, but useful in understanding what is going on. We also need, indeed it is essential, to discover who has recovered and has immunity. Those people, and there may soon be significant numbers of them, can be allowed to maintain the services others need (not least spiritual services).

A sample comparison:

When you give your teenager keys to a car, you are adding to the number of drivers on the road, from the riskiest demographic. You have increased the risk (from zero if they do not drive) that they will kill/maim themselves and/or others. Yet, you are willing to accept the risk that they or others might die - because of the convenience of having another driver in the family, or possibly more serious factors.

Given the facts and statistics about driving (which are well-known and meticulously kept, in stark contrast to the statistics about a brand new virus we do not full understand), do you have a moral duty to protect your children and strangers by ferrying your high-schooler to and from school and activities every day? If your kid kills someone, are you responsible? Is your convenience more important than the lives of strangers? How high would the statistical chance of death/killing need to be before this became a moral conundrum? Is there a magic number?

My only point here is that in real life, there are tradeoffs and unintended consequences to all our decisions. The philosopher takes all these questions seriously, and realizes that the answers are very often not obvious. The modern citizen bypasses the intellectual process, and re-posts a meme, while filled with righteous moral indignation. Stopping and thinking would be a better approach.

What is this talk of "abandoning our duty to God"? Your duty to God is to sanctify the Lord's day by rest from servile work for yourself and those under your authority (third commandment). This is divine law and cannot be dispensed by anyone. The Catholic Church normally obligates us to assist at Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation under pain of mortal sin. This is a Church precept which can be dispensed for good reason. For our pastors to ignore the recommendations of the civil authorities at this time verges on hubris, as does portraying those recommendations as some sort of persecution.

The bishops are doing their job, looking after the welfare of their flocks.

Trying to steer this in a different kind of productive direction.....


If you're grateful for something your bishop has done recently, list it here.

Our Bishop has decided to go on the defensive and limit participation in the Chrism Mass. It's easy to delude ourselves that the USA has a better health system than Italy's, but The Washington Post linked to some actual statistics.

@Richard Mix

That Italian report has plenty of red flags to show why Italy is such a disaster zone at the moment.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ITA/italy/death-rate

To put Italy's figures in perspective, on average 600,000 Italians die each year, so c.1600 a day. When looking at the death rate for Covid, it will be more interesting to see the excess deaths, rather than the total number of people that have died after testing positive for the Covid virus.

Here they've canceled the usual annual pre-Holy Week day when they try to get everyone who rarely goes to go to Confession all at once, with all the priests attending all day. It works! But this year to avoid gatherings they've asked that parishes have a priest attending all day over the next weeks, to spread out attendance. Most buildings are open air anyway, if not they can use the porch area. More Masses are schedule to allow the few people to spread out. All elderly priests are excused from duties, and the seminary closed. Young priests continue normal duties for now.

CGZ,

I mean the typical confession hours are still the same. The arrangements of how to line up, etc., have been changed to keep people at a distance, but at least they can go without having to make an individual appointment.

jpnz - The point of an analogy is that the two things considered are not the same. But we consider one to gain insight on the other. So far, the coronavirus is not comparable to driving or the regular flu, which kill far more people every year. But I am giving the benefit of the doubt to the experts who predict that coronavirus could get much worse, thus putting it on the same level or even higher than these two other forms of death that we deal with every year.

However, your reply is just the kind of thing that worries me. Because the coronavirus COULD be very bad, we are therefore not allowed to consider our response to it, on a purely philosophical level, by considering our response to other deadly things that we deal with every single year. In short, we are not allowed to (supposed to?) think. That is scary.

The decisions about Mass have been made by our legitimate spiritual authorities, and I thank them for it. The public decisions are being made by our legitimate temporal authorities, with advice from the experts. The decisions are not mine to make, but I am a rational being and still free to think rationally and calmly about the situation. This will happen again, and probably soon, and the more thinking we do the better prepared we will be.

The fact that we have a somewhat effective (depending on the year) flu vaccine that some people elect to receive, does not in any way negate my point about continuing Masses and life as usual during flu season. In spite of the vaccine, there are tens of thousands of deaths every year from the flu, which is the point. The same will likely be true of coronavirus next year, when we have a vaccine for it. The moral/philosophical question will remain.

There are a lot of countries in the world - Italy is only one of them. China, which is now moving past the end of the coronavirus scare, with many, many times the population of Italy, had fewer deaths than Italy. Same for Japan, with double Italy's population. It seems Italy is a statistical outlier. We might want to think about why that is.

Roughly 50,000 people in the USA committed suicide last year. It is rational to expect a serious uptick in those numbers in the coming year, due to social isolation, depression, economic ruin, destruction of small businesses, etc. This is worth considering.

None of us are making the decisions, but calm, rational thought and discussion may be helpful and it sure won't hurt anyone.

CGZ - to your updated theme of the thread, I am grateful to our bishops for making this decision, even though I may not like the decision. That is part of being a leader, and hopefully it will help keep the church from tearing itself apart right now.

According to an article in today's New York time, we could see 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. because of Covid-19 (coronavirus is a general term that includes the flu, SARS, MERS, and other viruses) this year alone. This is a worst case scenario, with the best case being in the hundreds of thousands. The actions of our government are currently inadequate to achieve the best case scenario.

who has recovered and has immunity...

This doesn't mean they can't still carry the virus, though, does it?
Just because it doesn't affect you doesn't mean you don't affect/infect others.
It's like people who get a whooping cough vaccine, and then inadvertently transmit (shed) whooping cough to the rest of their general population, instead of staying home for a while to avoid transmission.

I don't believe public Masses should be disallowed (and I really dislike the awkward, in-the-face-of-the-priest live-streamed Masses... why does Mass need to be "versus populum" when there aren't even any "populi" in the building? Just offer Mass ad orientem, for pete's sake, and let them learn something new out of this situation..."

According to Church Militant's article today, the bishops haven't the authority to ban us from Mass.
•They may offer the dispensation. We may partake of it. They may not force us to not partake of Mass.

Our earthly lives are never to be placed above our spiritual lives.
These decrees are making martyrs and saints look ridiculous.
(If it were not for the internet, I don't think these bishops would be getting away with it.)

- I'm thankful we still have confession and adoration Mon-Sat.
- I'm thankful that canon lawyer priests know that their bishops weren't actually allowed to ban people from receiving on the tongue, and therefore didn't refuse it to those who could not bring themselves to receive Our Lord in the hand.

May God have mercy on us all.

Kathy... perfect.

Reparation is now a significant focus for the faithful.

Charles, I didn't say anything about a specific bishop or priest. =D
It was really odd to be singing the propers at home, rather than at Mass. =(

https://photos.app.goo.gl/6Y5SoXFYUx8JsZZy5