Scaled-back churches open doors
Some parishioners return with face masks and social distancing measures
Mass at St. Martha Catholic Church began with organs that were soon cut short by an excited priest.
“I want to make an announcement,” the Rev. T.J. Dolce said as the music faded. “Good morning, everybody, and welcome home. It’s good to see everybody in the church again. Welcome back.”
The 250 or so congregants seated before him at the Kingwood church on Sunday agreed and responded with applause.
Christine Price could hear the clapping from outside. There, she and about a dozen other parishioners sat in lawn chairs under the few spots of shade, listening to the sermon broadcast over speaker from behind the closed doors a few hundred feet away.
It was the closest to a live Mass that Price had been since the outbreak of COVID-19. The 73-yearold opted against going inside the church Sunday because of health concerns, but she was still overcome with emotion multiple times throughout the service.
“It’s felt strange — empty,” she said of worshipping in quarantine at home. “You can listen to the Mass on television, but it’s just not the same.”
Across Southeast Texas this weekend, many of the faithful shared in Price’s joy as some churches held scaled-back wor
ship services.
Such events are allowed to resume at 25 percent capacity under Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to slowly reopen Texas’ economy, provided that congregants wear masks and practice social distancing.
The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston also said last week that Catholic churches could hold services on a limited basis. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo also said that priests should give communion only by hand to prevent the spread of the virus.
That was a godsend for Price, who sat outside of St. Martha’s specifically to receive communion after weeks in isolation.
She lives alone and recently retired after decades of working as a funeral director, a job she said “reminded her every day that nothing is permanent.”
Still, the difficulty of the last few weeks became clear a few minutes later, when the priest walked outside to give communion to the more cautious.
As a dozen or so more emerged from cars to receive the blessing, Price slowly approached her priest and received communion. She sat back down afterward and spent the next few minutes quietly wiping her eyes and alternating between staring at the ground and the horizon.
“This just got really emotional for me,” she said as she walked to her car.
Abiding by those rules has forced some creativity: At St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in The Woodlands, parishioners were asked to reserve spots for services ahead of this weekend so that church leaders could coordinate their entrances and exits from the sanctuary with social distancing.
“We’re kind of treating it like boarding an airplane,” Stephen Lenahan, the church’s director of communications, said earlier in the week.
Parishioners did not seem to mind: 7 a.m. Mass was full, with several people on standby, and the 9 a.m. Mass brought about 190 people into worship at the church, which normally has a capacity of 1,500.
Among those in attendance was Judy Blasingame. She said she’s gone to church every Sunday that she could remember — until COVID-19.
“It was really hard,” she said.
“This is the longest I have ever gone in my life without being inside a church.”
Neither she nor her husband had concerns about attending church, especially given the numerous precautions in place. Attending church with all of the limitations was strange.
“But it was worth it,” Blasingame said. “Like even wearing a mask to the grocery store feels weird to me, and not going out, doing what we normally do, feels weird.”
‘A fluid situation’
After this weekend, Lenahan said the church will re-evaluate and is taking the crisis week by week. If St. Anthony feels that it is not safe to continue holding Mass in the church with its members, it will close again. For weeks, the church has been livestreaming its services and continues to do so even as members are back in the pews.
“Everything about this is a fluid situation, and we understand that,” Lenahan said.
Most other churches and religious groups are taking a slower approach.
Lakewood Church said earlier this week that it will remain closed, and Second Baptist Church of Houston, which has tens of thousands of local members, is resuming limited services at its various campuses next weekend.
Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, in downtown Houston, is also planning to slowly reopen in the coming days. The massive church allowed parishioners to re-enter the building for private prayers and confessions earlier this week at the request of archdiocese leaders.
Most mosques will also remain empty in the coming weeks — even as Muslims across the globe celebrate Ramadan, a 30-day period of fasts that are typically broken with community prayers and meals in the evening.
“We have no plan to open until we hear from the medical experts and health care agencies,” Sohail Syed, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, said Tuesday. “The order says you do not have to open and ... once you open it up, everyone wants to go in, and it would be very difficult for us to turn people away.”
Many health experts would advise as much. As the spread of COVID-19 escalated earlier this year, multiple outbreaks were linked to church gatherings, including one Washington state church choir in which nearly every person contracted or died from the virus.
‘Like coming home’
Dr. Peter Hotez, an expert on vaccines at Baylor College of Medicine, said people should be weary of any large gatherings until at least mid-June.
Doing otherwise, Hotez said, could spark a second uptick in confirmed coronavirus cases that wouldn’t be measurable until much later.
“Things will seem OK for a few weeks and then rise precipitously,” he said. “There is a lot of risk.”
For some, the risk was worth taking. Many who attended Masses this weekend said that the return to church and their communities — even if briefly, in masks and separated — was rejuvenating after weeks in quarantine.
“It was hard not being able to come here,” Michelle Bitolas said as she left Mass at St. Martha’s. “It was like being kicked out of your home. So this feels like I’m coming home.”
Nearby, her priest, Dolce, wished parishioners well as they walked to their cars, sometimes stopping members to ask about their mothers or, at one point, blessing a 2-week-old baby in a car seat.
He, too, was re-energized. “This feels like a family reunion,” he said. “It makes me think that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.”