With congregants hit by covid, priest makes house calls
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — In all his years walking into houses with a little white bottle of holy water, Father Kristopher Cowles had never received a request like the recent one when a parishioner led him to a basement and pointed to a bed near a poster of the Virgin Mary and a carton of Clorox wipes.
“Can you bless our quarantine room?” said Ciriaco Barrera, a 64-year-old pork worker who secluded himself in the spot earlier this year only to see the disease take hold of his wife and daughter. “We can’t let it get us again.”
Cowles whispered a prayer and made the sign of the cross. He walked upstairs back into the light. He said goodbye to Barrera and drove through a city — like countless others across this land
— that endured what even the faithful found almost impossible to bear.
The Smithfield hog processing plant where Barrera works sorting pigs for slaughter remains home to one of the worst single workplace outbreaks in the nation. Two deaths and more than 900 infections in the spring led to a weekslong closure, a backlog on pig farms, and a crippling fear among the thousands of immigrants and war refugees from dozens of countries who dominate the workforce.
Through it all, Our Lady of Guadalupe and its pastor, who’s partial to the Gospel of John and composes homilies on the fly, have stayed resilient in a small, dimly lit brick church with a bright turquoise ceiling northeast of downtown. The only Catholic Hispanic congregation in this half of South
Dakota, a third of its parishioners are plant workers. The others have jobs cleaning hospitals and hotels or in construction and restaurants.
Most have gotten sick or know someone who has.
Cowles has knelt in their living rooms and stood on their porches. He has heard their sins and eased their burdens.
Cowles led the funeral for a community member who died and anointed another last month who recovered from the virus only to die of stomach cancer. He lit prayer candles when his secretary went into isolation as her parents became ill. For much of the flock, home visits, Facebook Live videos and phone calls replace Mass at the now half-empty church, where ropes block every other pew and hymnals are stacked away.
Sioux Falls, the state’s biggest city, where Smithfield is among the biggest employers, appears in many ways to have moved beyond the virus.
New cases grow each day alongside statewide flare-ups, like a recent cluster that shut down a Christian summer camp by Mount Rushmore that had ties to a Sioux Falls church. Still, the city boasts of consecutive days with zero deaths even as the virus surges in most corners of the nation.
Fewer workers call in sick now at Smithfield, where temperature checks, masks and face shields became the norm after it joined dozens of meat factories in shutting down. A high school parking lot test site for workers has closed and the corporation, under investigation by the federal government, has released only limited data on the virus at its properties. The company recently ran full-page ads in newspapers across the country, including The Times, criticizing “inaccurate media reports” about its handling of outbreaks and praising the “unsung heroes” it employs.
Yet for those reporting to the killing and processing floors on North Weber Avenue, the threat is real.
It’s a lurking, unwelcome guest who this community of new Americans, many of them Hispanic immigrants and others Asian and African refugees, pray never returns.
“Our Lady will protect us,” said Barrera, who spent six days a week at the factory and ran a 102-degree temperature in March before he was bedridden for a month.
Cowles has led the church for six years after seminary in St. Paul, Minn., a short assignment in the state capital of Pierre and two months training with priests in Guadalajara. A native South Dakotan who was raised in Yankton by the Missouri River on the Nebraska state line, he sticks out not only by his vestments, but with his pale white skin.
Cowles is fluent in Spanish, but he’s still learning new words and speaks with a thick American accent. Parishioners poke fun at him for the time years ago when he confused the words “servicio” and “cerveza” while preaching. In a part of the country with few Hispanic priests that are native speakers, he is forgiven his shortcomings. Cowles long ago stopped typing first drafts of homilies into Google Translate; he now delivers them in a kind of spiritual improvisation.
Many these days give a nod to the virus, though often not by name.
“Beside the presence of God,” Cowles said recently, “that is the one stable thing we have.”
Of the nine Catholic churches in Sioux Falls, the coronavirus has rearranged life at Our Lady of Guadalupe in ways unknown at others. Like elsewhere in the nation, the virus has disproportionately hit Hispanics in this community, although they make up 5% of the city’s population.
Some parishes are now packed on weekends, with no ropes cutting off pews. But Mass on Sunday evenings at Our Lady, where Cowles reminds spaced-apart families to spray and wipe their seats before leaving, might draw a few dozen people at most. As he did in the early days of the pandemic, Cowles still sets up his iPhone on a tripod at Mass to broadcast on Facebook to those who stay home.
The priest has stopped wearing a mask at most services; some parishioners still do. He keeps a pump bottle of hand sanitizer next to the altar, in case he accidentally touches someone’s mouth as they kneel to receive Communion on their tongue.
He tells parishioners to have “patience,” offering his own example of knowing the pain of being unable to pray with his mother. For months, Cowles could only see her through a closed window at her nursing home. Now they visit on a patio, wearing masks and sitting behind nets that keep them 10 feet apart. They shout to hear each other and end their reunions with air hugs.
“Church is open. And we’re not open,” Cowles said, noting that his bishop hasn’t reinstated the religious obligation to attend in person. “We have to respect those who want to come in. And those who don’t.”
As life returns to a new version of normal, Cowles has fielded applications to the diocese’s relief fund, which took calls weekly for help from those who were sick or had lost jobs. The church has written dozens of $500 checks to cover rent and medical bills, making up a small part of unemployment pay that applicants, many of them undocumented immigrants, can’t get. Most were non-Catholics or churchgoers from outside his parish.
But on occasion, he has seen familiar names among those needing help that listed the same workplace: Smithfield.