Are we reopening houses of worship on a whim and a prayer?
Alison Kemper has been an Anglican deacon for 40 years. She hasn’t been to church or seen her grandson in three months. She’ll do one of those things soon, because she talked to a doctor who gave his blessing. And, despite the Ontario government throwing open the doors to houses of worship in Stage 2 of reopening on Friday, it won’t be going to church.
“I think the questions have to be asked: How can we take responsibility for killing people?” said Kemper, who is also an associate professor at Ryerson. “You don’t want to be the priest that kills off your congregation.
“I would love to go back to church. But people will die.”
Among the complicated questions that come with Stage 2 of reopening in the COVID-19 pandemic, houses of worship are high on the list. Some businesses can open based on region, based on COVID conditions on the ground; Toronto, along with the entire Golden Horseshoe, Windsor-Essex and Haldimand-Norfolk, are still in Stage 1.
But houses of worship are allowed to open everywhere at 30 per cent of capacity. Many houses of worship have calculated what proper social distancing in their space looks like, and have concluded it adds up to less than 30 per cent. It’s not an epidemiologically calculated number, as far as anybody can tell.
“I guess it ticks off the crowded in close, closed, crowded,” says epidemiologist Dr. David Fisman of the University of Toronto, on three of COVID-19’s main known risk factors for transmission. “But it’s prolonged indoor exposure and there are aspects of worship that get pretty close. We’ll see: there’s nothing magic about 30 per cent. If it’s a 2,000-person mega-church, they just sanctioned gatherings of 600 people.”
“There’s actual data that shows that’s where the virus can spread,” says epidemiologist Dr. Nitin Mohan, who teaches public and global health at Western University and who co-founded a public health consulting firm called ETIO. He pointed to Patient 31 in South Korea, who was responsible for infecting nearly 4,000 people, among other church- or singing-driven coronavirus infections.
“We also know that elderly people tend to frequent those settings, and they’re most at risk. There has to be clear guidelines, and if they don’t feel like they know, they should really talk to their local health unit.
“There are things that I worry about and things that scare me, and this scares me. I really hope there is clear guidance on this.”
There isn’t. On the province’s website there are guidelines for 100 separate business categories, from agriculture to warehouses. But there isn’t one specific to houses of worship.
So many have to figure it out themselves. Dr. M. Hashim Khan is a Toronto respirologist and co-chair of the Canadian Muslim COVID-19 Task Force, which has been trying to establish COVID safety guidelines for mosques since the pandemic began. They corresponded with provincial officers of health, and tried to extrapolate how established provincial guidelines for businesses might be applied to places of worship. They looked at British Columbia, which gave a calculation by square footage, with five square metres per person.
“The math doesn’t add up for a lot of places, to have 30 per cent of capacity if you include physical distancing,” says Khan. “But all the government has said is 30 per cent. We passed through Ramadan and Eid, the holiest part of the Muslim calendar, with the mosques closed.
“The government has said 30 per cent, so some mosques are saying, why are you trying to restrict us, or (make us) take additional measures … that require funding. And (worshippers) sort of rely on the government to have done all the due diligence, that it’s safe, that everything has been taken into account. It obviously took us all by surprise; we hoped we would have a little more notice.”
The Rev. Joe Boot of Toronto’s Westminster Chapel at High Park had an idea, as he and Rev. Aaron Rock of the Harvest Bible Church in Windsor had enlisted leaders in the evangelical reformed Christian community to push the Ford government.
A petition sent to Premier Doug Ford in early May demanding churches be allowed to reopen was eventually signed by 443 churches and two synagogues. It reads, in part, “Neither confessional Christian faith nor the Church institute can faithfully exist without a Lord’s Day gathering. This divine obligation and hard-won historic freedom is so important for Christians, that it supersedes all human legislation and regulation.”
They asked for 40 per cent capacity, with B.C.’s limit at 50 people and Alberta’s at 50 people or one-third of attendance; as Rev. Boot says, “we knew we’d likely be in a negotiation, so we aimed high and shot for the moon.” He and Rock sent a second letter to the premier’s office on May 28, saying they had enlisted Toronto’s Orthodox Jewish community and they raised the spectre of a Charter challenge.
Boot says there were meetings with government officials and senior officials from the office of the chief medical officer of health, and that the evangelical movement leaders were apprised over the weekend that something was coming.
It wasn’t a surprise to Rabbi Hillel Lavery-Yisraëli of the Beth Jacob Synagogue in Hamilton, either. He was part of a 70-person Zoom call among religious leaders convened by
Conservative MPP Sam Oosterhoff on May 21, which included Labour Minister Monte McNaughton and MPPs Donna Skelly and Belinda Karahalios. Lavery-Yisraëli counted one other rabbi, and no Muslim leaders of faith that he could see.
“In that meeting the priests and the ministers said we need religious freedom, it’s a commandment to congregate, and it’s a commandment to sing, and you need to let us do these things,” says Lavery-Yisraeli. “And when I spoke I said the exact opposite: I said, safety is the most important thing, and we’ll stay closed for as long as we need to. I think I said, I don’t want to be the rabbi that accidentally kills off his congregants. It was an eye-opener for me.
“The whole thing doesn’t make sense. Why are funerals, which are held outdoors, limited to 10 people, and inside a church or a synagogue you can go up to 30 per cent with no guidelines on air conditioning, or open windows? It really doesn’t feel to me like a rational decision.”
“They chose a reasonable application of rules to hair salons,” says Khan. “But when it comes to houses of worship, it all gets thrown out, and there’s no science behind that. If anything, houses of worship are a higher risk. The virus doesn’t discriminate based on religion. It’s a responsibility not just to our communal faith, but to all Canadians.”
Ontario’s houses of worship can open Friday. Some will stay closed; some will have better safety measures than others; some will sing out loud. Let us pray. OPINION