MANCHESTER (CNS): “The regular practice of our faith in God is a well-established source of both personal resilience and dedicated service to those in need,” Vincent Cardinal Nichols of Westminster, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said expressing relief that churches in England would be exempt from closure during a third national lockdown.
“Such resilience and enduring service are vital in these difficult circumstances,” Cardinal Nichols said in statement published on the website of the bishops’ conference on January 5.
“I am glad that no measures have been introduced that would obstruct or curtail this essential source of energy for the common good,” he said.
However, churches in Scotland must close as part of measures introduced to contain the spread of a highly infectious new variant of the Covid-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), leading the bishops there to denounce the measure as “arbitrary and unfair.”
Churches in Wales and Northern Ireland—the two other states that make up the United Kingdom—will be allowed to remain open subject to stringent social distancing measures.
The responses to Covid-19 differ because it is treated as a devolved matter, dealt with by principally by national administrations.
All have entered lockdown, which one government minister said would last at least until March, amid a mass vaccination programme to counter a mutated variety of Covid-19, which scientists believe is 70 per cent more infectious that the original virus.
The lockdown was announced on January 4 by British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and new rules require that all people stay at home unless seeking medical assistance, buying food, exercising or fleeing domestic abuse.
Guidance for England says people can also “leave home to attend or visit a place of worship for communal worship.”
In November, Johnson was severely criticised by Catholic and Anglican leaders and many politicians of the ruling Conservative Party when he ordered churches to shut for a month during the second national lockdown.
Yet in Scotland, first minister, Nicola Sturgeon ordered places of worship to close from January 8 until at least February 1.
Her decision led the Scottish bishops to issue a joint statement questioning why “no evidence has been forthcoming to justify the inclusion of places of worship as sources of infection.”
They said, “Public worship is a human right and is a duty humanity owes to God,” adding, “Catholics need the Eucharist.”
