Tag Archives: Clergy

Protective gear, cellphone, video chats: How America’s clergy minister to COVID-19 patients

By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – Reverend Manuel Dorantes closed his eyes, took a breath to calm his fear and prayed when word came that Cardinal Blase Joseph Cupich had put out a call for volunteers.

Cupich, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, needed two dozen young priests to take on the sacred duty of administering the last rites to those dying from the new and highly contagious coronavirus.

For the priests, like doctors, nurses and other frontline workers, it means putting their lives at risk to care for the sick in hospitals.

“I know the consequences,” said Dorantes, 36. “We are called to do this.”

Throughout history, priests and other clergy have risked their lives ministering to the dying through population-decimating plagues and on the battlefields of wars.

But in the face of COVID-19, which has killed more than 150,000 people worldwide and about 33,000 in the United States, the Vatican last month waived the requirement for in-person worship and sacraments, including a special dispensation for believers who cannot receive the last rites.

Many faiths and denominations in America have taken similar unprecedented actions, as the coronavirus has upended one of the most sacred duties of clergy of most major faiths – ministering to the dying and comforting the bereaved.

The disease has forced clergy to rely on technology. Cell phones or iPads are held at the bedsides of very ill patients by nurses and orderlies.

During funerals, they preach to empty pews during services shared using sites such as Zoom and FaceTime. Graveside prayers can be attended by the barest few, sometimes just three mourners.

For clergy, this is the new normal, said United Methodist Bishop Thomas Bickerton, a member of the denomination’s ruling council of bishops, which has halted in-person worship services.

JUMP SUITS AND MASKS

Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, head rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Closter, New Jersey, said many hospitals won’t allow bedside visits by anyone, including clergy.

“We don’t even bother to ask,” said Kirshner, 46, who leads a conservative congregation of about 800 families. “It’s too dangerous.”

But the rabbi asks nurses or orderlies to hold an iPad so patients can see it. They then pray together. “It’s very, very important that we at least offer that.”

Some burials that under Jewish tradition should be held within a day have to wait a week or more, the rabbi said, in places where cemeteries and funeral homes are beyond capacity.

One Muslim imam said many funeral homes in the United States are no longer allowing the Islamic ritual of washing the body before burial, for fear of spreading the disease.

“For the family it’s tough because they cannot mourn the same,” Daoud Nassimi, an imam in Washington D.C., told the online publication Middle East Eye.

About 3 million Americans identify as members of the Episcopalian Church, which is largely relying on video chats and phone calls by priests to make that last connection with those on the brink of death, according to Reverend Lorenzo Librija of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

A few weeks ago, he came up with a plan to organize the effort. It is called “Dial-a-Priest” and is aimed at helping people who do not have a relationship with a local church, but still want to receive the last rites.

“We picked that name because it’s easy to remember and easy to Google,” said Librija.

His group has about 100 retired ministers who have volunteered to man telephones around the clock, ready to give the ritual ministration of death from the Book of Common Prayer.

The Archdiocese of Chicago, with its 24-member last rites team, is one of the few places in the nation where in-person visits to patients near death have continued in hospitals.

Dorantes, pastor of Chicago’s Saint Mary of the Lake parish, said he has conducted several bedside rituals since he volunteered in late March.

He and the other priests don protective jump suits and N95 respirator masks. Wearing gloves, they take a dab of blessed oil and make the sign of the cross on the patient’s forehead and hands using a Q-tip.

“Laying on of hands and anointing, this is the sacrament of the church, a visible sign of invisible grace,” he said. “I could see it in their eyes, incredible moments of grace.”

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

‘Religious left’ emerging as U.S. political force in Trump era

By Scott Malone

(Reuters) – Since President Donald Trump’s election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York’s Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.

In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London’s Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.

“The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action,” she said.

Although not as powerful as the religious right, which has been credited with helping elect Republican presidents and boasts well-known leaders such as Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, the “religious left” is now slowly coming together as a force in U.S. politics.

This disparate group, traditionally seen as lacking clout, has been propelled into political activism by Trump’s policies on immigration, healthcare and social welfare, according to clergy members, activists and academics. A key test will be how well it will be able to translate its mobilization into votes in the 2018 midterm congressional elections.

“It’s one of the dirty little secrets of American politics that there has been a religious left all along and it just hasn’t done a good job of organizing,” said J. Patrick Hornbeck II, chairman of the theology department at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York.

“It has taken a crisis, or perceived crisis, like Trump’s election to cause folks on the religious left to really own their religion in the public square,” Hornbeck said.

Religious progressive activism has been part of American history. Religious leaders and their followers played key roles in campaigns to abolish slavery, promote civil rights and end the Vietnam War, among others. The latest upwelling of left-leaning religious activism has accompanied the dawn of the Trump presidency.

Some in the religious left are inspired by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic leader who has been an outspoken critic of anti-immigrant policies and a champion of helping the needy.

Although support for the religious left is difficult to measure, leaders point to several examples, such as a surge of congregations offering to provide sanctuary to immigrants seeking asylum, churches urging Republicans to reconsider repealing the Obamacare health law and calls to preserve federal spending on foreign aid.

The number of churches volunteering to offer sanctuary to asylum seekers doubled to 800 in 45 of the 50 U.S. states after the election, said the Elkhart, Indiana-based Church World Service, a coalition of Christian denominations which helps refugees settle in the United States – and the number of new churches offering help has grown so quickly that the group has lost count.

“The religious community, the religious left is getting out, hitting the streets, taking action, raising their voices,” said Reverend Noel Anderson, its national grassroots coordinator.

In one well-publicized case, a Quaker church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 14 took in a Honduran woman who has been living illegally in the United States for 25 years and feared she would be targeted for deportation.

‘NEVER SEEN’ THIS

Leaders of Faith in Public Life, a progressive policy group, were astounded when 300 clergy members turned out at a January rally at the U.S. Senate attempting to block confirmation of Trump’s attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, because of his history of controversial statements on race.

“I’ve never seen hundreds of clergy turning up like that to oppose a Cabinet nominee,” said Reverend Jennifer Butler, the group’s chief executive.

The group on Wednesday convened a Capitol Hill rally of hundreds of pastors from as far away as Ohio, North Carolina and Texas to urge Congress to ensure that no people lose their health insurance as a result of a vote to repeal Obamacare.

Financial support is also picking up. Donations to the Christian activist group Sojourners have picked up by 30 percent since Trump’s election, the group said.

But some observers were skeptical that the religious left could equal the religious right politically any time soon.

“It really took decades of activism for the religious right to become the force that it is today,” said Peter Ubertaccio, chairman of the political science department at Stonehill College, a Catholic school outside Boston.

But the power potential of the “religious left” is not negligible. The “Moral Mondays” movement, launched in 2013 by the North Carolina NAACP’s Reverend William Barber, is credited with contributing to last year’s election defeat of Republican Governor Pat McCrory by Democrat Roy Cooper.

The new political climate is also spurring new alliances, with churches, synagogues and mosques speaking out against the recent spike in bias incidents, including threats against mosques and Jewish community centers.

The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, which encourages alliances between Jewish and Muslim women, has tripled its number of U.S. chapters to nearly 170 since November, said founder Sheryl Olitzky.

“This is not about partisanship, but about vulnerable populations who need protection, whether it’s the LGBT community, the refugee community, the undocumented community,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, using the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

More than 1,000 people have already signed up for the center’s annual Washington meeting on political activism, about three times as many as normal, Pesner said.

Leaders of the religious right who supported Trump say they see him delivering on his promises and welcomed plans to defund Planned Parenthood, whose healthcare services for women include abortion, through the proposed repeal of Obamacare.

“We have not seen any policy proposals that run counter to our faith,” said Lance Lemmonds, a spokesman for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group based in Duluth, Georgia.

(Reporting by Scott Malone in Boston; Additional reporting by Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Dina Kyriakidou Jonathan Oatis)