COVID-19 Archives

Church leaders need to prepare for realities of ‘post-peak’ restrictions

Apr 10, 2020

This year, we are looking to a different sort of Easter. We’re waiting for the “peak” in coronavirus cases, while at the same time trying to flatten the curve that gets us there.

By Charles Collins

New York’s religious leaders finding God at virus’s American epicenter

Apr 10, 2020

With Passover and Easter just around the corner, leaders from New York City’s Catholic and Jewish communities expressed their mutual conviction that God is present in their people’s suffering and warned about complacency in Catholic-Jewish relations.

By Nick Mayrand

Pope says priests, along with doctors and nurses, are pandemic’s ‘saints next door’

Apr 9, 2020

ROME – Celebrating one of the most unusual Holy Thursday Masses of all time, which took place in a nearly empty St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis remembered priests living and dead amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying they along with doctors and nurses represent the “saints next door” during the crisis.

By Elise Ann Allen

Warnings multiply against Easter holiday travel, gatherings

Apr 9, 2020

As the Easter holiday approaches, world leaders and health officials are fervently warning that the hard-won gains in the fight against the coronavirus must not be jeopardized by relaxing social distancing.

By Geir Moulson, Elena Becatoros and Nick Perry

Closed churches: Archbishop wants people to ‘celebrate many more Easters’

Apr 9, 2020

Acknowledging the pain that the world is experiencing as the novel coronavirus claims thousands of lives and disrupts everyday routines, Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori said he wants nothing more than to open wide the doors to churches, but such a step is impossible given “the massive public health threat we are facing.”

By Christopher Gunty

A sad Holy Week after virus death of 1st Catholic priest

Apr 9, 2020

In life, Father Jorge Ortiz-Garay would repeat the word in Spanish when he encouraged teenagers to stay in school, when he fed the homeless, when he consoled those who lost loved ones. The pastor of St. Brigid Church in Brooklyn was the first Catholic priest in the United States to die from the coronavirus outbreak. He was 49.

By Luis Andres Henao