With the Delta variant occupying our news cycles, I have been getting some additional questions about masking, distancing, and singing in the church that I want to address here. If I am honest, I am less sure about my decisions now than I have been at any other point during this pandemic. But even in doubt, I can at least offer you reasoning.
In a world marked by sin and death, a lot of life is risk management. There were, for example, 519 car accident fatalities in Washington State in 2019. It is always risky to get in a car. And yet we reduce the risk of death with driver safety training, seatbelts, airbags, and anti-drunk driving campaigns. We manage the risk, rather than prohibit all potential risk.
At this point, COVID has entered a phase where we are managing risk, rather than avoiding it altogether. At the beginning of the pandemic, people of a certain age who got the virus had better-than-average odds of dying of it. And it was spreading rapidly through asymptomatic individuals. The risk could not be managed, so we shut society down. Today, however, we have much better treatments for those who are infected, and we have powerful vaccines that are 97% effective against infection. The risk of death can be managed now, making our present decisions much harder and much less binary. Back when COVID spread widely and killed widely, it was easy to say that the risk was never worth it. Now that COVID spread is mostly confined to those who have refused vaccination, we have to ask how much risk is too much risk? And that is a much harder question.
In general, the archdiocese and myself would like everyone to continue to wear masks. It provides a significant reduction to risk for a very low cost to our worship, as opposed to say, stopping our congregational singing again, which would also reduce risk, but at a very high cost to our worship. However, because the overall risk is much lower than when we first started, we will also not be refusing entrance to people who will not wear masks, like we once did. So we exist in a strange gray area.
My biggest struggle is with the fact that risk is generally confined now to those who have chosen the risk themselves by refusing vaccination. For the vaccinated, operating as normal in society is just about as safe as getting into a car. And for the unvaccinated, I am happy to allow people to risk the consequences of their own choices. The Lord himself takes that approach with us (Rom. 1:28). The problem is that there are also children and the immunocompromised who cannot be vaccinated, who are at risk through no choice of their own, and I wonder if we have an obligation to protect them by being more insistent about masks or by pausing congregational singing, because even a small reduction to risk could be essential for them. My hope is that we can protect them in other ways, like maintaining our socially distanced section. But it is hard to know if I am right about this, which is why voluntary masking is so helpful.
For now, you will see me continuing to wear my mask at the altar, we will still require masks in the socially distanced sections, and I have asked our ministers to wear masks until they are seated. I am hesitant to require more, because I do think we are mitigating the risks adequately and do not need to be as draconian as we once were. May the Holy Spirit give us prudence.
Fr. Moore 