Midnight Mass and other religious services exempt from 8pm Omicron control curfew

45 comments

  10. Can they please fuck off, why can someone go to a church but I can’t go to a cinema? It doesn’t make sense

  11. MM sure loves being friends with the church.

    You would think the Irish gov would be a little less friendly to money laundering child murderers. Not the best optics

  14. Put all the old and vulnerable into a big room together. Separate and segregate the young and healthy. Covid only affects old people(95%~). Why would we allow this if we were genuinely concerned?

  16. I think its time we start our own church – it’ll be headquartered in my local, we believe transubstatiation occurs across a whole manner of food and beverage

  17. Gotta say I’m struggling to understand this one.

    In fact, when you consider the age demographics going to mass, they’re probably the most vulnerable.

    Especially when you consider cinemas have basically the same layout, can take the same precautions and potentially have better airflow/ventilation design.

  20. In fairness, churches are quite large with their wide doors open and not many people in their these days.

  21. Is there a Satanic Temple in Ireland?

    https://thesatanictemple.com

    They are a great group in the USA who go to bat against the government when the law favours religion (Christianity). The laws all have to state “religious exemption” so they propose obviously ridiculous and inflammatory ideas that use the same exemption to justify it. Usually it’s so upsetting to Christians that they have to reverse the original law.

    Have the pubs declare as part of the satanic temple and the drinking of Guinness is a religious practice.

    Feel I should state I’m pro vax and know we have to sacrifice to get through this all. Which only makes the preferential treatment of the church more infuriating.

  25. This is nuts.

    The amount of old people who have no respect for this virus and throw caution to the wind are going to pack into the church on Christmas eve. They simply don’t give a fuck.

    Nothing makes sense anymore.

  29. Me thinks there is a whiff if an election in the air, maybe not in the near future but they do need to start coaxing out their votes.

  30. There’s still a lot of religious misogynists running this country that will always try to give the church some of its power back.

  37. So basically no one is allowed to socialise except for the single biggest group of unvaccinated people so they can all gather in a single building and sing?

    Fuck this country so much. I’m leaving the first chance I get to a country that isn’t run by absolute morons

    EDIT: apparently this isn’t accurate. Don’t listen to it.

  38. Churches are extremely well suited for social distancing, they also have masks and cavernous interiors, a million miles from crowded pubs where masks cannot be used

  40. I’m going to paste an extract from a book called Pale Rider to by Laura Spinney about the 1918 pandemic. It’s a bit long but worth seeing that the Catholic church has long demonstrated a complete lack of regard for their congregation.
    A more recent example was the bishop of the Bronx who took the federal government to court and appealed all the way to the supreme court suing the state to allow home to keep his churches and services open. Of course it wasn’t his own money he was spending on lawyers but the donations of his congregation he was willing to endanger and offer up to the virus in an effort to keep the collection baskets full. There’s nothing stopping the bishops or indeed parish priests from doing the right thing and sucking it up like the rest of us and closing the doors at eight. They could show a bit of respect and backbone do they right thing but they don’t care sure a funeral gets them even more cash in the back pocket.

    > During the first wave of the pandemic, the country’s inspector general of health, Martín Salazar, had lamented the inability of a bureaucratic and underfunded health system to prevent the disease from spreading. Though provincial health committees took their lead from his directorate, they had no powers of enforcement, and they quickly came up against what he described as the ‘terrible ignorance’ of the populace–the failure to grasp, for example, that an infected person on the move would transmit the disease. Now that the Naples Soldier had returned, one national newspaper, El Liberal, called for a sanitary dictatorship–a containment programme imposed from the top down–and as the epidemic wore on, the call was picked up and echoed by other papers.
    > In Zamora, the two local newspapers did their best to dispel public ignorance. They tried, for example, to explain the concept of contagion. The flu ‘is always transmitted from a sick person to a healthy one’, the Correo told its readers. ‘It never develops spontaneously.’ Local doctors weighed in, but not always helpfully. One Dr Luis Ibarra suggested in print that the disease was the result of a build-up of impurities in the blood due to sexual incontinence–a variation on the medieval idea that immoderate lechery could trigger a humoral imbalance. The papers published instructions from the provincial health committee for minimising infection–notably by avoiding crowded places. Yet they seem to have shown a mental block–at least to modern, secular eyes–when it came to the activities of the church. In a single issue of the Correo, an article approving the provincial governor’s decision to prohibit large gatherings until further notice appeared alongside the times of upcoming Masses at the city’s churches.
    The papers also accused the authorities of playing down the gravity of the outbreak, and of not doing enough to protect people. Of national politicians, the Correo wrote, ‘They have left us without an army, navy, bread or health… but nobody seems to resign or ask for resignation.’ Local politicians, for their part, had long ignored calls to fund an infectious-diseases hospital, and were now ignoring recommendations from the provincial committee to impose stricter hygiene on the city. When a failure at a nearby hydroelectric dam led to a blackout, the Correo remarked with heavy irony that, despite the darkness, the hunger of Zamoranos and the filth in which they lived was plain for all to see. The night was densest inside the town hall, it quipped, which continued to plough money into bullfights but not into hygiene or food for a hungry population.
    On 30 September, Bishop Álvaro y Ballano defied the health authorities by ordering a novena–evening prayers on nine consecutive days–in honour of St Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence, because the evil that had befallen Zamoranos was ‘due to our sins and ingratitude, for which the avenging arm of eternal justice has been brought down upon us’. On the first day of the novena, in the presence of the mayor and other notables, he dispensed Holy Communion to a large crowd at the Church of San Esteban. At another church, the congregation was asked to adore relics of St Rocco, which meant lining up to kiss them.
    Also on 30 September, it was reported that Sister Dositea Andrés of the Servants of Mary had died while tending soldiers at the barracks. Sister Dositea was described as a ‘virtuous andexemplary nun’ who had accepted her martyrdom with equanimity and even enthusiasm, who had slept no more than four hours a day, and who had spent much of her time coaxing sick soldiers to eat. The Mother Superior of her order asked for a good turnout at her funeral, and the papers passed on her request. In accordance with tradition, readers were informed, the bishop would grant sixty days’ indulgence to those who complied. Apparently the turnout was not as good as the Mother Superior had hoped, because the day after the funeral the Correo lambasted the citizenry for its ingratitude. The bishop, on the other hand, was satisfied with attendance at the novena, which he described as ‘one of the most significant victories Catholicism has obtained’.
    As the autumn wave neared its peak, fear and frustration threatened to spill over into unrest. Milk, which was being recommended by doctors to speed recovery, ran short and prices rocketed. Local journalists noticed that Zamoranos seemed to be dying in higher numbers than the residents of other provincial capitals, and they told their readers as much. They also returned again and again to the pitiful hygiene situation in the city. Residents simply threw their rubbish into the street, for example, and nobody seemed to care.
    In October, the longed-for sanitary dictatorship came into effect. The authorities could now force businesses to close if they failed to meet sanitary requirements, and fine citizens who, for example, didn’t keep their chickens cooped up. The provincial health committee threatened the city fathers with large fines for their laxity in recording flu deaths. But daily Masses continued to be held throughout that month–the worst of the epidemic–and the congregrations only grew as terrorised Zamoranos sought respite in the churches. The prayer Pro tempore pestilentia, which acknowledges that the affliction is God’s will and that only His mercy will end it, echoed around their romanesque walls.
    Despondency set in. There was a feeling thatthe horror would never cease, that the disease had become endemic. In a letter circulated on 20 October, Bishop Álvaro y Ballano wrote that science had proved itself impotent: ‘Observing in their troubles that there is no protection or relief to be found on the earth, the people distance themselves, disenchanted, and turn their eyes instead toward heaven.’ Four days later, a procession was held in honour of the Virgin of the Transit. People flooded into the city from the surrounding countryside, and the cathedral was packed. ‘One word from the bishop was enough to fill the streets with people,’ one paper reported. When the provincial authorities tried to use their new powers to enforce the prohibition on mass gatherings, the bishop accused them of interfering in church affairs.
    As in other towns and villages, a decision was taken to stop ringing the church bells in eulogy of the dead, in case the constant tolling frightened people. But in other places, funeral processions had also been banned. Not in Zamora, where mourners continued to pass through the narrow streets as the din of the bells gave way to silence. Even in normal times, coffins–white ones for children–were a luxury beyond the means of most. Now, wood for coffins was hard for anyone to come by, and the bloated, blackened remains of the deceased were transported to their final resting place draped only in a shroud. In an echo of the ritual burning of incense to purify the altar, gunpowder was sprinkled in the streets and set alight. An approaching funeral cortège could thus be perceived only dimly through choking black smoke, mixed at times with the fog that rose from the Duero in those cool autumn days. ‘The town must have looked as if it were on fire,’ one historian observed.10
    By mid-November, the worst was over. The bishop wrote to his flock attributing the passing of the epidemic to God’s mercy. While expressing his sorrow for the lives that had been lost, he praised those who, through their attendance at the many novenas and Masses, had placated ‘God’s legitimate anger’, and the priests who had lost their lives in the service of others. He also wrote that he felt comforted by the docility with which even the most lukewarm believers had received the last rites.11The epidemic was not over when the bishop wrote his letter. There would be a reprise–milder than the autumn wave–the following spring. The journalists had been right: *Zamora had suffered worse than any other Spanish city. *

  43. “Obviously covid was created by the devil, and thus won’t enter a church”- Micheál Martin probably.

  45. Elderly, vulnerable people crowded in pews in buildings will typically poor ventilation: Fine

    Young, boosted people having a late dinner in a restaurant: Unacceptable

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