WELBY’S AT-HOME EASTER
“It has been an Easter like no other,” said The Daily Telegraph, with “separated families, shrunken festive lunches, empty streets” – and closed churches, too. Churches of all descriptions were forced to shut their doors to worshippers for the first time in hundreds of years, said The Times. Even at the height of the Second World War, that didn’t happen. What’s more, the Church of England actually ordered the clergy out of their churches, forbidding them from celebrating services there to stream to parishioners. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, recorded his Easter sermon in the kitchen of his Lambeth Palace flat. In Rome, the Pope live-streamed his message from an almost deserted St Peter’s. In Germany, a church even held a drive-in service, broadcast via car radios.
It’s not just Christians who have been affected, said Luke Coppen in The Spectator. This is a holy time of year for the other great monotheistic religions too. Last week, Jewish families were forced to begin the festival of Passover without gathering friends and family for the ritual Seder meal. Ramadan is expected to begin on 23 April; the Muslim holy month will have to be marked at home. In all cases, online celebrations must suffice for the duration, and any contact will have to be virtual. For many religious thinkers, the fear isn’t so much the lockdown as what comes after. “Will people get out of the habit of worship? Might faith – already fast declining in Britain – enter a downhill slump?”
“It is pretty obvious that Britain’s religious leadership has fluffed the pandemic,” said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t just the decision to seal up the churches – implying that they are “less essential than an Oddbins” – but the failure to say much to their flock except “stay indoors”. “We needed hope. We got health and safety.” But it’s quite right that the churches observed the rules, said The Guardian. Besides, a church isn’t made up of bricks and mortar; it is made of people. And in Britain, internet services have generated virtual congregations far bigger than the numbers who previously attended in person. As one rabbi observed, fresh from officiating online: “Judaism is now in the cloud – which, let the record note, is a biblical euphemism for God.”