News Releases

The COVID pandemic will not take away Christmas 2020!  It will, however, change the way we celebrate it, especially in our churches and parishes, if current circumstances continue as they are or worsen.  Because COVID is a highly contagious airborne virus, the prospect of large (or larger than usual) crowds gathering  indoors this winter for long periods of time without ample ventilation and proper social distancing, as well as the necessity to sanitize churches between Masses, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day Mass schedules will be affected, especially in parishes where there is only a single pastor or priest assigned.  The COVID pandemic’s maximum one-third occupancy restrictions in churches coupled with the need for social distancing will limit the space available for parishioners to attend Christmas Mass as usual.  Church schedules will also have to accommodate required cleaning.

When the dispensation from the obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation issued by bishops for their dioceses during the COVID pandemic is finally lifted – and it will be – Catholics will be required again to “return to church.”  Canon law defines “dispensation” as a “relaxation of a merely ecclesiastical law in a particular case” that “can be granted by those who possess executive power (canon 85).”  The Mass obligation referred to above is an “ecclesiastical law” presented in the 1983 Code of Canon Law: “On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are obliged to participate in Mass (canon 1247).”  Its history is much older than that.

The Catholic Church believes and teaches that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death. For that reason, we, the Bishops of each of the dioceses in New Jersey, join in voicing the strongest possible opposition to the “Reproductive Freedom Act.”