Don’t close the churches because of coronavirus

Last night, when the Prime Minister made his address to the nation he declared that places of worship would be closed – thereby putting churches on the same basis as outdoor gyms. Today a statement from the Ministry for Communities clarified that churches should stay open, for private prayer. All good, Catholics like me thought. We can sit at the back of the church, in the presence of the sacrament, and say a few prayers. Yesterday I dropped into my parish church and I found one other person there, a young man kneeling before the altar, as I’d found him the day before – an oddly moving sight. On Sunday there were all of three of us in there, sitting not so much at a social distance as an anti-social distance, at other ends of the church.

So why has the Catholic Bishops’ Conference advised the Government to close churches and instructed its own parishes to do so? According to the statement from the bishops, the trouble is that ‘the very fact of [churches] being open could draw people out of their homes.’