Engaging Anew with the Hopes of Parish Communities

The year 2020 will not be forgotten by the global community for many years to come. The global pandemic, COVID-19, has shaped our experiences and the way in which we now view the world. This is the case socially, economically, politically and religiously. The pandemic has revealed much about how our world operates and it has revealed much about our religious communities and their engagement with the wider community. The PEW research center's Twenty Striking Findings from 2020 lists at least two findings that are related to religious belief. The first is that a substantially large majority of adults in the United States, eighty-six percent, say there is some kind of lesson or set of lessons for humankind to learn from the corona virus outbreak, and one third, thirty-five percent, say these lessons were sent by God. Some of these lessons include the importance of spending time with the family and loved ones. Others are more social in nature and include the need for universal health care. The second striking finding which draws on explicit religious themes is that around half of Americans, forty-nine percent, say that that Bible should have a great deal of influence on the laws of the United States. White evangelical Christians are especially likely to hold this view, some even favour the Bible over the will of the people when there is a conflict between the two.¹

While these facts and figures tell us something about attitudes at the macro level, there has also been deep grappling by religious communities on the ground level across the globe. In particular, (Catholic) parish communities have been forced to reflect on their ability to respond to their parishioners during a pandemic, their capacity to adapt to a new situation and their likelihood of returning to a pre-COVID parish community existence. What does a parish community do when faced with lockdown? Parishes, which have been predominantly used to people coming to their doors, suddenly have found themselves in a situation where they need to find their way to the front doors and into the homes of their parishioners. Debates arose immediately around the provision of online (pre-recorded or livestreamed) Masses.² Was it, and is it, possible to celebrate the Eucharist in a virtual space, in an authentic way in which the fourfold presence of Christ in the Eucharist³ can be experienced? These debates will continue.

For many parishes there was the realization that they had been left behind in a world that has become used to connecting through online platforms and multimedia formats. Some parishes found themselves without the simplest of databases as the result of years of ad hoc record keeping and complacency, or even resistance, towards basic online tools such as email and electronic news. For those parishes it will be hard to see how a full recovery to parish life will be possible without some major reform. Others managed to connect with their parishioners in new and creative ways, including online gatherings for education, social justice, and hospitality. Some were able to create virtual choirs, others online catechetical classes and others still virtual prayer walls and support groups. And of course, local neighbourhoods within parish communities also rallied to support one another with shopping needs, care giving, telephone calls to those who were isolated and news updates for those on the social media fringe.

Not all were caught up in these initiatives and just as it required a major effort to connect with parishioners from near and far it conversely required only a few months of church lockdowns for some people to break the habit of regular church attendance. In Australia, for example, the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference released the church attendance data for 2016 which showed a drop from 12.2 percent in 2011 to 11.8 percent of Catholics regularly attending Church in 2016. The expectation is that the 2021 data will drop to under 10 percent. This will be due to a mixture of socio-cultural factors, the sexual abuse crisis and now the global pandemic...