CHICAGO — It’s Easter Week, Holy Week in the Catholic faith, prime time for St. Agnes of Bohemia in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. Typically, the church’s live procession along 26th Street enacting the Stations of the Cross draws 5,000 worshippers alone to the South Side enclave. It has for generations. “It’s like a whole season really, of confirmations, of first communions,” said the Rev. Don Nevins, the church’s pastor. “Families wait until Easter, for nice weather, for baptisms. We’d do 15 every weekend in April. Sixty a month! Now because of coronavirus, it’s on hold.”
Joseph Santos, not quite a year old, was scheduled to be baptized on April 25 at St. Agnes. His parents, Isabel Rodriguez and Ivan Santos, planned a party and dinner; they picked out his Bible, his rosary and a cloth used to wipe baptismal waters from his face. They bought a ceremonial candle and a devotional necklace of the Virgin Mary, then they made sure it was blessed. They bought him white pants, white shirt, white shoes.
“Now I’m starting to wonder when he’ll get baptized at all,” Rodriguez said.
Her mother, who lives with them, is a Chicago police officer. “She’s really the only one who leaves the house now. We’re healthy, we’re good. Still, it’s hard not to be worried. As a Catholic, I want my son baptized should anything happen to him. It’s important.”
Further south, in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, Lauren Doig was planning also to have her two-month-old Nicholas baptized on April 25. She grew up Catholic in Oak Forest, her husband grew up Catholic in the very Irish community of Beverly. Baptism, and the celebratory party that traditionally follows, meant bringing together two large families, “but you do it because it’s the way you’re raised, it’s part of Catholic culture. It’s a happy thing. And it’s a sacred duty, one that you want to do soon as you can. You’re born into this world with sins, the church says. And there’s always a chance something happens. Now, because of everything, I’m thinking — I’m hoping — I really don’t want to baptize a two-year-old.”
Baptism is one of Catholicism’s seven sacraments.
If you’re not familiar, these sacraments — confirmation, communion, marriage, anointing the sick, being ordained as clergy, confession and baptism — constitute the centerpiece of Catholic theology, “public moments when the church comes together to witness God’s power,” said the Rev. Robert Casey, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. “We are a community through sacraments. Now we don’t have an opportunity for public moments.”
Of course, a large part of most religion is community and ritual, and yet in the top-down theology of Catholicism, there is something uniquely cruel about this crisis: Each Catholic sacrament requires — even insists — on physical touch, personal intimacy or the proximity of a community, all of which are rendered nearly impossible by a pandemic.
“Everyone is suffering,” said Keara Ette, director of ministries at Old St. Patrick’s Church in the West Loop, which was founded Christmas morning in 1856. “But sacraments are the first layer of understanding that most Catholics have. They are distinctly tangible. You touch and feel. There is a closeness in a congregation, this essential togetherness.”
A pastor pours holy water over heads during baptism.
Marriages are joined by clergy, performed before family and friends.
A first communion and confirmation are aww-inducing ceremonies, with the Eucharist (the wafer that Catholics use to represent Jesus Christ) often delivered directly onto the tongue.
“Even confession,” said Nevins, “you really can’t do it right now. You can’t have someone sitting six feet away, telling you secrets and hoping that no one is listening in.”
Gloria Camarena lives across the street from Old St. Pat’s. Her son Mateo, five months old, as set for baptism in March. She took the church’s preparation course, she arranged for a godparent to fly in from Las Vegas. “It’s been burned into me, you get your child baptized soon as possible,” she said. She asked the church if she could have it done with just the parents, child and priest; she was told, sorry. “Which I totally get, but now we hope it happens before Mateo can walk up and splash water on himself.”
Baptism, for Catholics, is meant as an introduction into the church, “as the gateway sacrament you first need before receiving most other sacraments,” said the Rev. Kevin McCray of St. Mary Parish in Evanston. Though it remains part of church teaching that baptism be sought soon after birth, many pastors say they baptize two- and three-year-olds routinely now. “The speed thing came from a time when birth was risker, and when a family always lived close, which is no longer the assumption anymore,” McCray said.
Indeed, sacraments were built to be routine itself, as stability and order, always there, and always certain. The world may change, the theology teaches, but sacraments don’t.
Yet that statewide quarantine — along with recommendations from the pope in Rome, not to mention the Archdiocese of Chicago — means, for the moment, a postponement.
Ryan Brady, of Mount Greenwood, was being ordained as a deacon on May 9; in his third year of theological studies, he was one of about 50 men receiving holy orders in a ceremony at Holy Name Cathedral. That sacrament has been paused indefinitely now.
“When they told me about the delay, I began to say the serenity prayer to myself, over and over in my mind,” he said, “you know, ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change … .’ I don’t like the word ‘canceled’ though, because these sacraments are so integral to our lives as Catholics, you can’t cancel a gift from God.”
Instead, for the time being, many Catholic parishes have gone online during the pandemic, primarily with virtual Sunday services, often through Facebook and Zoom.
Which, ironically, brings Catholicism a bit closer to other faiths right now, struggling to settle on a digital substitution for ceremonies that are, fundamentally, flesh and blood.
Many traditional Jewish rituals at Congregation Bene Shalom in Skokie, said Assistant Rabbi Shari Chen, are either being postponed (bar mitzvahs) or live streamed from the temple online, including services for Passover and even the practice of sitting shiva, a traditional act of mourning following a death (now happening via video conferencing). “The overriding principle, regardless of faith really, is you never do something to endanger others, so ‘virtual’ it is,” she said. Likewise, Kamran Hussain, president of the Muslim Community Centers in Albany Park and Morton Grove, said mandatory Friday prayers — which is somewhat akin in importance to Sunday services for Christians — may not be happening in mosques, yet the ritual itself is not the point.
“We have Ramadan coming, and the usual programs are canceled,” he said, “but if you break it down, you don’t need a brick and mortar location to be a good Muslim. A lot of our community is having a hard time without the mosque — we even had backlash from some who felt closing was too extreme. But historically, there is precedent in Islam for these situations. From what we understand, we get more reward praying in mosques, but I think a lot of people start worshipping rituals and not the reasons for those rituals, and the one thing we teach is that preserving life is the most important thing we can do.”
At Baptist churches, baptism is also mostly on hold, said Nate Adams, executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association, which estimates there are 950 Baptist churches in Illinois. And yet, considering that baptist churches don’t answer to a governing body like an archdiocese or the Vatican, and that their theology doesn’t require clergy to perform rituals, he suspects “individual places will be figuring ways around.” For example, Crossroads Community Church in Carol Stream is conducting small baptisms, separated out every 30 minutes for sanitation; each ceremony will be videotaped and editing into a seamless string of baptisms, to be broadcast online during the church’s virtual services on Easter.
“We’re choosing to go ahead because historically, (baptism) is such a part of our celebration,” said Senior Pastor Scott Nichols. “We could postpone, but there’s nothing magical involved exactly, and it’s so important to who we are, we wanted it to be there.”
Meanwhile, in Catholic churches, the only sacrament being performed now is the anointing of the sick or last rites — and only then, if a person has coronavirus, archdiocese directives say a priest must be specially selected and younger than 60, without ailments. However, the church does make concessions for “extreme emergency,” allowing anyone, Catholic or not, to perform a baptism if a life is threatened. Think soldiers on a battlefield. Auxiliary Bishop Casey said his mother, a nurse, performed her share of delivery-room baptisms on children not expected to live.
Then there are Catholics who feel that a pandemic is an extreme emergency.
Ricardo Villamil was set to have his daughter baptized at St. John Cantius in River West. She was born in March. “You want it done quickly, especially in times of crisis. I understand a need for safety, but grocery stores have gotten innovative. There should be ways around. A baptism needs four people? Well, I care about the salvation of my child, and if that means family isn’t there, OK. A church is needed now more than ever.”
Actually, the Rev. Joshua Caswell at St. John Cantius agrees.
The church, among the most conservative in Chicago, is streaming services like other churches; they are obeying the Archdiocese of Chicago and have four newborns and 20 adult converts waiting to be baptized. “But I think (archdiocese) guidelines are extreme on this,” Caswell said. “Smaller baptisms could go ahead. The sacrament can be very personal. Baptisms are social activities now. Not everything has to be a social experience.” He said performing mass in a church empty of parishioners reminds him of “clergy in the Middle Ages, holding services in the mountains without a congregation. Which doesn’t make it less a service.” So he’s telling the adults set to be baptized of an old teaching: God bound salvation to sacraments, but God is not bound to sacraments.
Indeed, though the Archdiocese of Chicago has frowned on suggestions of cell-phone confessions and drive-in-ish services as substitutes for its church during a pandemic, no less than the pope has trotted out a handful of lesser-known theological concepts lately. Among them, “spiritual communion,” which is basically the receiving of the Eucharist by someone unable to physically receive it, and “baptism by desire,” which Caswell himself has used: “I told the 20 adults waiting that, though they can’t be sacramentally baptized today, by the desire they’ve shown, the church already recognizes them as its children.” .
It’s a sentiment reflected by many clergy and flock interviewed for this story. They say the new restrictions have reminded them that Catholic theology is not just about going to church, and that being prevented from sacraments has forced them to appreciate the meaning of what had become close to a routine. They feel more intentional in their faith.
“If faith is only tied to church, that faith is not much more than a building,” said the Rev. James Donovan of St. Barnabas Parish in Beverly. “So a lot of sacraments are being lived right now. A guy told me he’s with his wife so much they’ve run out of things to argue about.”
Just don’t expect wholesale change.
The Chicago area is home to more than 2 million Catholics, according to the Archdiocese; its 316 parishes (in Cook and Lake Counties alone) performed more than 20,000 baptisms, 20,000 confirmations and 4,000 weddings in 2019. When it comes to the sacraments, there is no new norm. There is nothing that frees them of their innately physicality, said Auxiliary Bishop Casey. Once the pandemic ebbs, there’s no chance of virtual sacraments. However well-meaning, virtual church itself has left parishioners cold, pastors say. Said Lauren Doig of Beverly, “Oh, it’s just not the same.”
So, in the meantime, church leaders have urged Catholics who couldn’t see a priest, visit church or receive a sacrament during quarantine to speak directly with God. “An act of contrition done well,” said Pope Francis, “and our souls become white like the snow.”
That apparently works, too.
———
©2020 Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.