When do we reopen our churches?

Today is a rare day as it is 5/20/2020. I really can’t tell you what is going to happen today, but I checked our Internet sources whether or not the stars in the heavens would align. Perhaps you may ask, “What does it mean for the stars to align?” Star alignment refers to the astrological idea that when the positions of certain planets sit in defined angles (30, 45, 90 degrees) in relation to the position they had at one's birth, then good or bad things will happen.

So for further information that has nothing to do with COVID-19, I got this piece: “In the northwestern sky after sunset on the evenings of Thursday, May 21 and Friday, May 22, the orbital motions of Mercury and Venus (curved lines) will bring the two planets close together. On Thursday, Mercury will be a finger's width below (or 1 degree to the celestial southwest of) Venus.

“Since Venus is descending while Mercury is climbing, on the following evening Mercury will move to Venus' upper left. The two planets will be easily told apart, since Venus will appear nearly 30 times brighter than Mercury. When viewed in a backyard telescope, Mercury will show a nearly fully illuminated disk, while Venus will show a very slim crescent. This difference in illumination is happening because Venus is passing between Earth and the sun while Mercury is on the far side of the sun. Look for the main belt asteroid Vesta located less than 5 degrees to the southeast of the two inner planets.” At least for whatever it is worth, this is happening in our evening skies for Thursday and Friday.

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I got this text from a good friend who mentioned what CITE Technical Institute Inc. has been doing with its feeding operation in Talamban. This was from lead person Jandyl Delatina. “Feeding program updates. May 18, 2020 was successfully done. We fed 350 direct beneficiaries from barangay San Jose, Urban Poor, 23 construction workers, 44 stranded students, 64 frontliners and lastly 5 from teachers, for a total of 486 beneficiaries. As of today’s operation, we provided around 6,968 meals. On behalf of CITE Team, thank you so much for your continuous support and cooperation. We would also like to thank our generous sponsors and benefactors for this week of activity.” CITE Technical Institute, Inc. is operated by Opus Dei Cebu Chapter led by my good friend, Fr. Roy Cimagala. Kudos to CITE for this feeding operation that helped a lot of people.

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Just a couple of days ago, at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, the Catholic faithful attended and received the Holy Eucharist after two and a half months of being denied such by the Catholic Church in order to stop the spread of the COVID-19. What about us in the Philippines or specifically the Cebu archdiocese?

We gathered that the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) has decided to reopen our churches for only five to 10 people. In reaction to this, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo said the limitations the government set on the number of allowed persons inside churches were “unreasonable.” The bishop added that it would have been better if the government imposed the measurement of the distance between two persons inside a church to observe physical distancing and prevent the spread of coronavirus than limiting the number of attendees to five or 10.

We also learned that the IATF came out with the regulations without asking the opinion of religious leaders. As the bishop pointed out: “This directive on religious activities was surely taken without any consultation with the religious sector. This is a problem with the government. They make arbitrary decisions without proper consultation with the sectors involved. So they came out with unreasonable directives.”

It seems that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines-Public Affairs Committee Executive Secretary Fr. Jerome Secillano agreed with Bishop Pabillo, saying “I think (it’s) an ‘abuse of prudence.’ There are so many big churches in the country that even with a hundred attendees the one or two meters required for social or physical distancing will not be violated.” So I guess it should be the CBCP that should come up with the guidelines and date as to when we should reopen our churches. If our economy is starving, so is our spirituality, which by far is more important to our people.

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