Prayers: Pastor of St. Eugene-St. Cecilia arrested for Covid violations; under canonical review too

Chrism

The details at the melancholic-choleric Rorate caeli blog here.

Posted mostly for prayers, but as I imagine a lively discussion will ensue as well, please remember that this calamity was brought upon us by an anonymous person who observed the situation and made a complaint, and (if my inference was not altogether clear already) that anonymous persons do often observe our discussions as well.

Kathy

I don't understand why folks just can't follow these rules for now.

I would love to attend the TLM nearby perhaps once a week, as has been my custom for some years. But since no one wears a mask or keeps any kind of physical distance there, I only attend the Novus Ordo.

Casavant Organist

I have no words, except to promise prayers for these priests and to ask prayers for my own area where the restrictions are only tightening and making life even less livable.

MatthewRoth

I will say this: New Catholic's disrespect of Mgr Aupetit is both something that only a schoolyard bully could say and is something worthy of immense shame, and I suppose it is for this reason that NC writes anonymously.

I don't understand why folks just can't follow these rules for now.

Because the rules are annoying, incoherent, and cause all sorts of other problems, and on top of this, even if we were to be obedient to a T, the government isn't going to negotiate in good faith; they certainly tried to delay reopening public worship in May 2020, and then they took their sweet time to sit down with the bishops in November, after the Conseil d'État ordered the government to allow public worship. Finally, the prime minister refused, at first, to walk back a capacity limit that Macron had promised to repeal in a late-night phone call to the president of the French episcopal conference.

The best example of the annoyance is how it affects children. I haven't met anyone who can effectively discipline their child wearing a mask, certainly not in church, and "talking louder" while wearing a mask is inconsistent with not spraying particles everywhere.

Then there's communion. One is supposed to receive on the hand in many French diocesess; an understanding, implicit or otherwise, has been reached in trad or conservative dioceses, but it's not being advertised. In my local parish, the ministers distribute starting in the back, and they just sort of drop the host into your hand.

We haven't had holy water available in most churches since the lockdown ended in May 2020.

This might be perceived as a minor annoyance, but seeing everyone masked in the sanctuary is extremely ugly for many people.

This said, I find masks to be the path of least resistance, but the government is going to get fussy over seating, which, OK, the benefit to me has been seeing how much better it is with fewer benches and chairs. But I'd prefer that this come from our end and not because of coronavirus measures.

CCooze

...for now.

Because it's obviously a garbage rule. People have been wearing masks so much and told that everyone who does not is going to cause their demise that some people may never leave home without them, again. I see individual persons walking their dogs or going for a run, and they even wear masks. What on earth?

We've been told since the church re-opened,

This [set of rules] is only temporary.

At what point do we recognize propaganda for what it is and say we aren't going to do it? It's just preposterous. How many times do you hear the same thing repeated to you before realizing, this is the definition of conditioning ?

CharlesW

The Sunday obligation returns in this diocese at Pentecost, that is unless something happens between now and then to change that. As a Byzantine, I don't care much about Latin obligations and will go back to public worship when I feel it is safe to do so. I have been wearing masks since the pandemic started. Did it help? I don't know but it did me no harm other than fogging my glasses at inconvenient times.

Liam

My tonsils have never been as invisible in decades. I've loved not having colds and often ensuing weeks of laryingitis. (PS I can certainly recognize propaganda. It often comes from people alleging it most volubly.)

a_f_hawkins

To repeat myself - the Japanese were conditioned to wearing masks by the Spanish flu epidemic a century ago, and have accepted it as common courtesy to others at any respiratory infection ever since. Death rate per million from this virus : Japan 74 USA 1,723 . No proof of connection of course, could be conincidence.

Chris Garton-Zavesky

Hawkins,

I can't dispute the Japanese conditioning data. I can, however, present California where, about a week and a half ago the governor asked us to shelter in place for two weeks to flatten the curve. Statewide, we've been wearing masks, keeping a people-free-zone, and avoiding unnecessary tasks since March 17, 2020, which is a week and a half ago, since that same good governor has told us that we can return to life as normal (except for the masks and the people-free-zones, and vaccination and frequent testing) in June.

Our case load of alleged COVID cases has led the nation from most of those 10 days.

a_f_hawkins

CGZ - it won't work, three weeks is the absolute minimum. Our current lockdown started on the 3rd March, it is likely to be 5 weeks to achieve elimination of unexpected cases (the orange curve, the blue curve is cases in people already in quarantine and under observation)

Chris Garton-Zavesky

Hawkins,

Am I reading your chart correctly? It seems to suggest that since so few cases are contracted by travel, we should all be travelling much more than we are!

francis

I am going to Mars. Contacting Mr. Musk tomorrow.

a_f_hawkins

CGZ It works because we are an island. Inward travel is restricted to residents, who are then required to quarantine, with any other members of the household with whom they are in contact. So onward transmission counts as known source. We've been doing that since March last year. It kept us free from the virus and otherwise to behave normally from June to January. It failed then because of one false negative test, who was released from quarantine, and went out celebrating for Christmas and the New Year

mmeladirectress

Francis -
I hear it's really hard to find a Mass on Mars.

Liam

Definitely neither wheat nor grapes. Finding water would be a challenge.

Chris Garton-Zavesky

Madame,
Francis will be taking along his own priest, who always travels with a proper Mass/Sacrament kit.

a_f_hawkins

Update - the two priests from St. Eugene had been detained for a time after attending for questioning, but were released 5 hours ago.

MatthewRoth

By the way, their detention is quite serious; there's no real equivalent in Anglo-American law; either you have to cough something up and charge, or you have to give them up. In any case, it signals the government's intention to charge you or at least to continue pursuing you as a person of interest in order to charge you.

jgirod

Very precisely, the non-catholic friend of someone who was baptized that night filmed with his cell phone and reported to the police that the priest had baptized several persons with the same water (should he have consecrated as many jars of baptismal water as people to baptize for the whole year?) and touched their foreheads with bare hands (guess what: he must have anointed them).

Whether or not parishioners all wore masks is another question and not necessarily the responsibility of the celebrant. Note also that churches usually have a high ceiling, so that the air circulation is closer to what it is outside than what it is in most enclosed locations. In France we must obey the rule of using one bench/row out of two and leaving two empty seats between people (or between groups of related people from the same family).

vansensei

Those priests are more than welcome to join the SSPX at St-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. This way they can avoid this bishop. No one has tried to report them to the authorities iirc.

Jehan_Boutte

The priests have been released and are now free. Abp Aupetit ordered the parish to follow the sanitary rules which apply today in Catholic churches of the Archdiocese.

Elmar

This way they can avoid this bishop

Isn't that a rather protestant attitude? And I'm saying this as a German...

MatthewRoth

Well, we'll see. SESC was pretty obviously targeted because it is trad, and I don't want to question the archbishop or anything, but it's upsetting that the CEF and archdiocesan spokespersons totally unloaded on the church only for evidence to come out of others, perfectly normie, not following the rules. I would not have invited other people to go digging, because the unspoken rule was, until now, that you don't ask about what happens at Mass or in empty churches open for private prayer.

I'm sure that Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet has been reported; they got into some trouble for livestreaming the Triduum last year, behind closed doors. A neighbor snitched when the organ started at the Gloria of Holy Saturday. In any case, the police have their reasons for generally not interfering in churches, and the Parisien story is what unloaded all of this, because the Triduum was also the first time that you could see the congregation on a livestream from SESC. But the SSPX situation is also another can of worms because the church is owned by the city of Paris, notionally given to the diocese, and occupied by the SSPX; the diocese is supposedly opposed to the SSPX presence, but nobody wins if they get expelled.

Also, for what it's worth, the police were going to have to go hard once the news came out; I don't think that Mgr Aupetit could have done anything differently to avoid the detainment of the priests.

a_f_hawkins

At the recorded Mass last Sunday both the celebrant and a layman, apparently on behalf of the Parish council, made statements. I could not catch what was said, my French is rusty. The Mass was a missa cantata with no servers, but a fair amount of choral music.

MatthewRoth

The tl;dr is that the parish is adding Masses, that the person who made the accusations isn't acting in good faith, that the accusations are misleading, false, and calumnious, and that in general the church is more strict than the government and has been even before the first lockdown. The parish council's VP read the letter from Mgr Aupetit, and Canon Guelfucci read the letter of Cardinal Sarah addressed to himself as pastor of SESC. The celebrant, abbé Grodziski, didn't speak apart from the homily, and I didn't listen to that part.

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