C21 Resources Supplement: Imagining a Post-COVID Church by The Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College

SU PPL E M E N T

IMAGINING A POST-COVID CHURCH T H E C H U R C H I N T H E 21S T C E N T U R Y C E N T E R

S P R I N G /SU M M E R 2021

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The Church in the 21st Century Center is a catalyst and a resource for the renewal of the Catholic Church. C21 Resources, a compilation of the best analyses and essays on key challenges facing the Church today, is published by the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College, in partnership with publications from which the featured articles have been selected. c 21 center director

Karen K. Kiefer

creative director

Patrick Goncalves the church in

21 st century center Boston College 110 College Road, Heffernan House Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467 bc.edu/c21 • 617-552-6845 the

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IMAGINING A POST-COVID CHURCH Dear Friends: This second supplement to the C21 Resources issue “Catholic Parishes: Grace at Work” highlights and celebrates the work of Catholic parishes in the face of the pandemic. You can see the Spirit at work in the creative solutions and practices shared. Our parishes need our support now more than ever, so please consider donating online or keeping up your monetary commitment. We are all in this together. Every blessing,

Karen K. Kiefer Director, Church in the 21st Century Center karen.kiefer@bc.edu

CONTENTS

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C21 Easter Series: Revitalizing Our Church During COVID Creative Ministry

Ministering to the Underserved

Hope for the Future Church

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Unsplash/Mateus Campos

The C21 Easter Series: Revitalizing Our Church During COVID created an opportunity to gather information on strategies that parishes have implemented to welcome back their parishioners and move forward in this new reality. The series presented best practices that spanned over three webinars. This C21 Resources Supplement serves as a dedicated resource for parishioners and parish leadership.

LEADING DURING COVID: LESSONS LEARNED AND THE PATH AHEAD

The first conversation in the series featured panelists who are leaders in the Catholic Church. The invited guests offered their specific insights to best practices and recommendations during the health crisis, and which challenges have been most formidable. Dr. Ximena DeBroeck is the former Director of Catechetical and Pastoral Formation in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. She is also Adjunct Professor of Sacred Scripture at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and senior fellow at St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. Sr. Elaine Poitras is a former Teacher, Principal, Associate Superintendent, Director of Curriculum and Testing, and Superintendent for two dioceses.

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Fr. Peter Grover is a Priest with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary and the Director of St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine in Boston. He also teaches classical languages and biblical studies at St. John Seminary, the Theological Institute of Boston, and Pope St. John XXIII Seminary.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION: Visit bc.edu/c21easterseries2021 to watch the full-length video of the C21 Easter Series: Revitalizing Our Church During COVID.

ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES DURING THE PANDEMIC The second conversation in the series addressed how disparities have become painfully apparent in the COVID-19 pandemic for low-income communities. Ximena Soto is the Assistant Director of the Latinx Leadership Initiative at the Boston College School of Social Work.

Fr. Paul B. O’Brien has been the Pastor of Saint Patrick Parish in Lawrence, MA, since 2001. He is the founder of the Cor Unum Meal Center, a founding trustee of Lawrence Catholic Academy, and the President of WGUA 98.1, a Spanish-language Catholic radio station.

Fr. Octavio Cortez is the Pastor of Saint Anthony’s of Padua Parish in New Bedford, MA. He is a member of the Institute of the Incarnate Word (I.V.E.).

Philip Landrigan, MD, MSc, is a Pediatrician and Epidemiologist. He is the Director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College. His research examines the health impacts of toxic environmental hazards.

VIEW FROM THE PEWS: PARISHIONERS IMAGINE A POST-COVID CHURCH The third conversation in the series offered insights to how parishioners imagined a post-COVID Church. Melodie Wyttenbach has been the Executive Director of the Roche Center for Catholic Education and a faculty member for the Lynch School of Education and Human Development since 2019.

Adrián Alberto Herrera is an Associate Director for the Office of Evangelization and Catechesis in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. He has served as consultant to the National Advisory Committee on Adult Religious Education, formerly known as NACARE.

Rose Mary Donahue is the Assistant to the President of Boston College. She has worked on a variety of projects and initiatives, including the establishment of the Church in the 21st Century Center.

Taiga Guterres is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies for marketing and programming, where he promotes the institute’s publications, events, and mission through print and online advertisement.

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Creative Ministry

FR. PAUL B. O’BRIEN We had a flatbed truck brought into the rear of that parking lot and to socially distance every single person six feet apart you can fit 1,500-plus people. We have a sanctuary on top of the truck so it’s visible from almost all of the space. We’ve got a concert-quality sound system that a local DJ who had a huge conversion brought in for us that we ended up purchasing. We celebrated mass outside. People brought their own chairs if they wanted chairs. We celebrated one mass on Sunday in English, one in Spanish. And in the good weather, we were up to as many as 700 people at those Masses, which we never would have been able to effectively do with all the precautions inside. And during Black Lives Matter last summer, to be able to come together, to be with everybody and to talk about these issues collectively, it was a hugely powerful worship experience. Lawrence Catholic Academy is about a 400-person school we have for pre-K, ages three through grade eight. And it has operated from the get-go remotely for the last academic year, and then this year, both in-person and remote. When we are told that everyone’s going to die if you have in-person, inner-city education, that is not true. We are running a super-vibrant, very-well attended Catholic school in person and remotely with all the challenges involved through all of this. So for the 6

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education crisis, a parish is not going to solve it for an entire city. But we are successfully addressing it for at least a couple of kids and a couple of thousand family members. DR. XIMENA DEBROECK One of the things that we wanted to begin doing was to shift away from a simple classroom model, where we traditionally sat the children down with textbooks and instead just tried to go to a family model. We’ve tried to encourage parish catechetical leaders to consider other ways to begin inviting families to come to faith and not simply understand faith formation as something that the parish does, the priest does, the catechist does. ROSE MARY DONAHUE One of the things we tried to do was is identify the different needs of the parish, and then try to address them and also help to provide a sense of community for those people. The pastors stepped up. They were doing blogs. The pastoral staff started a daily rosary on Instagram, and a number of our parishioners then began to participate in that as leaders of the rosary. We knew that we couldn’t open for the liturgy, but we found ways to open the church eventually for private prayer. And then we were able to offer communion at those times. This has been such a great time of innovation.

saintpatrickparish.com

We knew that we couldn’t open for the liturgy, but we found ways to open the church eventually for private prayer. Rose Mary Donahue

Zoom and technology have been a lifeline during times of COVID, and have been really essential for our ability to communicate with people and to keep them engaged to help them to experience a sense of fellowship. But I can’t help but think that going forward it’s going to be a door. You’re engaging people that otherwise may not have participated in a retreat. But now you’re offering opportunities for people to engage on a deeper level, and I think some of those experiences can actually lead people back to the Church. I can’t speak for younger people, but I see in the students that I engage with, in young people in my own life, that it’s really the experience of

God, the experiences they have that bring them to God. We can start to think about new ways to provide those types of spiritual experiences, help them to connect to their own faith life, help them to realize that it’s actually there even though they may not think that they’re spiritual people. I think there’s a whole group of people that we can connect with using technology. I think it’s an extraordinary opportunity. ADRIÁN ALBERTO HERRERA I personally followed up with phone calls with some of our leaders and especially people who’d been going through a late leadership program, just to touch base. I think that helped me a lot as well to get to know people on another level, not just from a religious perspective but also from a human perspective. I think the Church is trying to reach out as much as they can in different ways. With Zoom through this pandemic, I’m reaching people that I had never thought that I was going to reach because there’s so much hunger for people to connect. FR. PETER GROVER I’m keeping the communication really strong. Every donation I get, I thank them. Our bulletin is online. We went paperless. I always give an update every week in the bulletin.

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MELODIE WYTTENBACH The pandemic really forced all of us into what I’m terming as a liminal space, a space of transition, where so many of us were kind of grappling with anxiety or confusion and uncertainty as to what was going to happen in the future. During that time, I often turned to my faith. Church can be a space for comfort when we feel that sense of disarray. With churches kind of being forced to close, COVID really pushed me to begin to think a little bit about where faith formation happens and by whom. So how can we really kind of creatively adapt during this time to provide sustenance for ourselves, for our communities, for our families?And so it really kind of pushed this area of innovation in ways where I think we need to be thinking differently about what church means, and to really begin to say that church is not just in the four walls, that it happens everywhere, and how God is truly in all things. Pope Francis again reminds us that parents have that beautiful task of passing on the faith to their children, and it begins in the home. And so here, literally and figuratively, the Church moved into the home environment. And because faith is transmitted in dialect— dialect of the family, dialect of the house, and the atmosphere of the home—here was an opportunity to have church move into our home in a way and to try to creatively engage our children. In a time of crisis, we can find the opportunity to be creatively engaged. A number of my colleagues and friends who have young families clearly thought there was something missing in those remote virtual Masses for young children. And so in brainstorming with staff at the C21 Center, we came up with this idea to break open the Word on Sunday mornings with a program called Breakfast with God—a 30-minute program from 9:00 to 9:30 where children listen to the gospel. They get a chance to converse with their parents in a small, virtual community about what the gospel means, and then to engage in songs and cre-

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Boston College OUC/Melodie Wyttenbach

FR. OCTAVIO CORTEZ What we try to do is to implement what is called a virtual family catechesis. We try to bring parents to the parish and give them a lesson. And then they go back and they teach the children. We prepare videos with some volunteers to do remotely. And that’s how we have been trying to get in touch with the youth of our parish so they continue to be catechized. Whenever we can, we have youth meetings. We try to do our best to reach out to them. Hosffman Ospino, who’s on the faculty at BC, and his wife, Guadaloupe, are the directors of my Hispanic apostolate. This year they put together an all-virtual walk through the catechism of the Catholic Church. So for every family, one chapter per week, they’re online with an introductory session by video. Our catechists make phone calls each week to a group of families to be see how they’re doing and to support them in their needs.

ative art activities and read aloud. It really allowed for the connectivity of what happens in the church experience to become really familiar to children in their home environments and in a way that was at their level. And this community of Breakfast with God has grown every Sunday to between 100 and 200 children and parents. Just the teachers and leaders in Catholic schools who persevered during this time and opened up their classrooms for children to learn has been nothing short of heroic. In terms of schools, I witnessed how children are learning with stations of Plexiglas around their desks and masks on and distanced apart, but they’re together. There’s definitely a joy in being in the presence of one another and being able to learn with one another, even though there’s the distancing. I think the remote learning options and the hybrid options are here to stay. Families who want those options for their children will continue to seek them out. I think that teachers have a two-way

built upon and bring people together.

Saint Columbkille Partenership School

I found that people don’t necessarily want to get off technology; that there’s a desire for that technology to actually be nourishing and to feed their spiritual lives. I encountered on our virtual retreat a woman named Joan. She’s a nurse from New York who shared in our virtual prayer wall that she was finally on a lunch break from the COVID floor. Here she was, a frontline worker in the middle of her shift, asking for the community to pray for her strength and for the health of her patients. And so I think what I’ve seen is that technology can be a grace. From my experience, age has not been a barrier. There’s been a real desire and willingness to adapt, and the reality of technology is that it is part of our daily lives. I think when given appropriate guidance, people of all ages have been able to encounter and share in their desire for God.

immersion network of schools where one of our schools is connecting with another school in Guatemala, which allows for conversation in a native language. There’s a localization of the global that’s going to happen because of technology, which has allowed doors to open in ways that we weren’t thinking of before. So I think the kind of creative pulse of what teachers have the capacity for is only just beginning to emerge. TAIGA GUTERRES I think there’s been a beauty in breaking away from my business to physically come together to church, for church, and as church, and I definitely don’t want to let go of that. I definitely want to get back to that. But there’s also a bit of beauty for me during this time in the reach of meeting people in their homes or even in the opportunity to pray with nurses on the COVID floor on their breaks. What I hope is that attention and intention for the creativity in the boundlessness of parishes can be

SR. ELAINE POITRAS In the diocese that I’m living in now, the Diocese of Manchester, the bishop offered $1,000 discount tuition for anybody who would come into the Catholic schools. That was a nice invitation, and he also did that for the people who were already in the Catholic schools and then said that he would pay a second year. So those $1,000-a-year invitations certainly brought the people in and hopefully will keep them in. That is going to be the biggest challenge, how to sustain that enrollment once everybody can go back to regular school and whether people will be willing to continue to pay. That requires leadership in our schools—a ministry of presence and servant leadership to actually be able to move out of the old paradigms and into the new paradigms. School leadership was also working hard to create, or at least sustain, the faith community on which Catholic schools are based while everybody was separated from each other. Many of them did a wonderful job, and I’ve heard this from a lot of places about teachers going from house to house and leaving gifts for the kids but the principals also going from house to house and leaving gifts for the teachers, meeting them six feet apart in masks and just putting the thing in the middle of a sidewalk. Those were beautiful things, beautiful efforts at being present, at being servants. That whole sense of ministry of presence and servant leadership is important at every level of leadership. I think it will continue to be. I also think that’s what gives hope to the Catholic schools.

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PHILIP LANDRIGAN, MD, MSC As we look at the distribution of the pattern of disease and death from COVID-19, it becomes very obvious very quickly that certain segments of the population were hit disproportionately hard. Nobody was harder hit than minority and marginalized populations. We came to realize that this disproportionately heavy burden of COVID on minority and marginalized communities reflects longstanding disparities. There are differences in housing and access to medical care, indisposable income, which allows them to purchase medical care. And most recently since we wrote the article, it’s become obvious that there are disparities in access to the vaccine, at least in some states. And we noted further that these disparities are widening, that the policies, especially policies in the United States over the last four years, policies ongoing currently and in some other countries like Brazil, are causing these disparities to become even greater so that the poor are becoming poorer and the rich are becoming richer. Regressive tax policies are part of the burden. They have the impact of decreasing in purchasing power and real wages for the poor while increasing wealth at the top of the pyramid. And as we looked at these disparities, true as scholars at Boston College and the Catholic Research University, we look at them through two lenses. On the one hand, you can look at them scientifically and say, yep, the rates of disease are three or four times higher in poor minority people than other people. But you also look at them through the lens of ethics and morality. And you realize that this is much more than just biology at work. This disproportionate pattern of disease is the playing out, is the elaboration of long-standing differences that have existed, literally, for centuries in the United States, and some of which can trace their origins quite directly back to slavery. The problem that we’ve had in this country, which I 10

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Boston Globe/Erin Clark

Ministering to the Underserved

traced politically back to approximately January 20, 1981, is that we’ve just been systematically disinvesting in education, in the public health infrastructure, in a lot of the safety net dimension of American society for something like four decades. There have been other countries that have not gone through those bits of investment. They have maintained those structures. And they have done re-

I do not have the financial resources, nor am I going to find them, to meet the needs of the city that is undergoing 33% unemployment. But I can feed them all, anyone who needs to be fed. Fr. Paul B. O’Brien

markably well. Some of them have been rich countries, like Germany, like Switzerland. But others have been very poor countries who just had the right pieces in place. We really have to reinvest in public health systems at every level, at the local city level, at the state level, nationally. We have to resource some of those budgets. It’s time for local, state, and national leaders to rebuild that infrastructure so that there’ll be people who are trained in

medicine and nursing who can supplement the work of the parish volunteers and do what needs to be done to keep body and soul together. Because when you’ve got 20%, 30% of a society underfed, undereducated, underpaid, it pulls down the whole society, which is what we’ve seen here in COVID. The countries that have more equity than we do, a narrower gap between the rich and poor than we have in this country, have done far better than we have in the United States where we have some extraordinarily wealthy people and then millions upon millions of people who have trouble putting bread on the table. So I think these are big fixes. They don’t really speak to spiritual needs, which I leave to my ecclesiastical colleagues. But it’s the physical underpinnings that have to be put in place to enable the spiritual to take root and to grow. DR. XIMENA DEBROECK The city of Baltimore would open and go back, open and go back. During this time of absence of in-presence worship, it gave a new possibility to consider the isolation of those who are homebound and those who are sick; that there are folks who minister to them routinely. Being in solidarity with those who are in isolation was definitely a unique moment of growth for all of us. Along the same lines, however, not being able to experience gathering in person also gave us the unique possibility of imagining us as a eucharistic people when we couldn’t gather in person. FR. OCTAVIO CORTEZ Here at St. Anthony’s, we have a food pantry. And I started to see families that before the pandemic would not show up for the food pantry. But since the pandemic, they started to come because they didn’t have the means to pay for food or other things, for example, daycare for their children, and so they have to stay home. And it is like a domino effect in their lives. I could see the heavy emotional and spiritual stress in families in my parish that affected their whole lives. We have been trying to address that, helping them in different ways spiritually, opening the churches as much as we can for them to pray, trying to provide food and shelter to those in need. Those are some of the things that I have noticed and we have been trying to address with the Hispanic community. FR. PAUL B. O’BRIEN Lawrence is a city that’s about 80,000 people on the New Hampshire border. It is 75% Hispanic, the plurality of whom are Dominican. The culture is really driven by Dominican culture. It’s the economically poorest city in Massachusetts. About 30% of people live below the poverty line, about 40% are children under age 18. Average per capita income is a little bit over $17,000. At least two-thirds of our families are single-parent families. A galaxy of social ills even in the best of times. At any given time in Lawrence, 75% of children are at risk for hunger. So this is the extreme of social and economic poverty in Massachusetts in the best of times. So we’re

dealing with the immediate care issues of all of those people, a crisis, and then the reality of the public health spread. It has spread so much here not because people are being lazy, but because people largely live in very crowded living conditions. They work front-line jobs. They don’t have a choice not to work, economically. We have a place called Cor Unum (one heart). It’s a meal center, which is a big, beautiful restaurant that we built 15 years ago that serves free restaurant breakfast and dinner 365 days a year to anybody who’s hungry in Lawrence. In a regular year, we serve about 250,000 meals. Since last March, we’ve had to shut down the dining room. And so we distribute those same restaurant meals as to-go meals every day for breakfast, every day for dinner. The morning after the shutdown last March, we served breakfast. That evening we served dinner. We’ve never missed a meal for 15 years. And we haven’t missed a meal in COVID. For young people in this community and old people the number one outreach we have to one another is feeding one another. And in the economic mess that we’ve got, at least we know that this parish is feeding anybody in Lawrence who is hungry 365 days a year. If I thought that was important before COVID, boy, do I get it now. I do not have the financial resources, nor am I going to find them, to meet the needs of the city that is undergoing 33% unemployment. But I can feed them all, anyone who needs to be fed. And the people who are working as volunteers during all of this are almost all under age 18.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION: Read “COVID-19 and Health Disparities: Structural Evil Unmasked” by Dr. Philip J. Landrigan on bc.edu/c21landrigan.

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TAIGA GUTERRES I was actively involved in helping on the sacristy, helping participate in liturgy. For me, I think once it was all remote, there was a sense of loss. And a part of me felt a little bit deeper that the body of Christ is in the Eucharist but also in the presence of community and the community that I actively participate in. I think for me, virtual Mass as a concept wasn’t new. I watched ritual mass done by Pope Francis or prayer services along the border. And there’s a sacredness, I think, to the bodily practice of going to church, to coming together with the community, to being in the presence of another. For me it was this external movement of the pilgrim just to go to church. I’ve also found that my faith community has challenged me to participate and find community in creative ways during this last year. I think in the time of COVID there’s been a real thirst for the deep connection and communion that comes not only from a sort of spiritual dryness but from a deep grace of desire, and upon arriving at that well, I feel deeply that it really is filled with living water and a community seeking to draw from it. One hope I have is to utilize the tools that are emerging. I see virtual space as a tool. Ultimately, our faith is of a God that’s incarnate. My hope is that the post-COVID Church finds ways to creatively expand our reach while still tending specifically to that depth, so that our interactions, however they may be and wherever they may be, create an opportunity for that interaction of our desire and thirst for God, which ultimately leads to that embodied encounter of communion. MELODIE WYTTENBACH My hope moving forward for our Church is we don’t forget how that interconnectedness and our actions affect one another. We really are better together when we’re in community for and with one another.And finally that the children have such a special place at the table. Children

I think our church will continue to heal and there will be new life as long as we make sure that the youngest among us are always present. Melodie Wyttenbach

bring such hope and joy to our world, and we must continue to celebrate them as they bring new life to our Church while it continues to heal. And there will be new 12

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Hope for the F life as long as we make sure that the youngest among us are always present.

ROSE MARY DONAHUE I was fortunate to be in a parish where we had the resources and the staff in place to pivot to remote opportunities for worship. What I found was that I started to think about my faith differently. I started to look for faith and to really discern in a very different way what faith meant to me and the importance of the spiritual community of our parish. I think we’ve changed programming to address the needs of the community in a way that we just never thought about. So I’m hoping

out ways to do that with all of the different sectors of our community. The young, the family that needs someone helping, providing resources to help raise their children in the Faith. And I just hope we can figure out how to build on that. I think, too, it’s a reminder that we all need each other, and that we’re all in this together. We are one Church, and technology does give us an opportunity to connect and swap ideas. And the pandemic has given us an opportunity to rethink and reposition a rebirth. It’s so fitting. It’s a beautiful resurrection for all of us. ADRIÁN ALBERTO HERRERA I hope that this time, where people may feel isolated and depressed, our Catholic faith will bring a sense of missionary identity.

Future Church

Boston College OUC/ St. Ignatius Church

DR. XIMENA DEBROECK My hopes for a post-COVID world are that we come back as a renewed people of God, aware that God is present with us in difficult times, and open to the possibilities of new ways of doing things in order to bear more fruit; that we really become the people who live our faith 24/7, not just one hour each week. SR. ELAINE POITRAS My hope is that we can become more proactive than reactive at this time. It’s the right time to reexamine our paradigms and transform them to fit more appropriately into the 21st century and beyond. It’s also a good time to create a Catholic environment that provides a genuine welcome, especially to those people who have not come to church now for a year, and to enliven our community of faith.

we don’t lose some of that as we move back into the church, but they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. If anything, I think this experience has strengthened my faith in ways that I just never would have anticipated. One of my big hopes is that there’s such a sense of longing but also excitement about the possibility of returning to church. Now that the vaccines are out, I just hope we can figure out a way to build on that. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to try to take advantage of that energy to engage people and to help to raise their sense of connection to the Faith and to the Church. And I hope we can figure

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION: Enjoy “Breakfast with God,” a 30-minute program hosted on Zoom, Sunday mornings at 9 a.m. EST. To learn more, visit: bc.edu/bwg

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The Church in the 21st Century Center Boston College 110 College Road Heffernan House Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467 bc.edu/c21 • church21@bc.edu • 617-552-6845

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