All together now
AS Christmas approaches and we prepare for it as best we can, parish priests face peculiar challenges. What will a carol service without carols be like? Will a socially distanced Nativity lack narrative coherence? Will the astringent odour of sanitiser be off-putting for those receiving Christmas Communion?
Will we even be able to offer Christmas Communion at all? I very much hope we will. Locked churches—an oxymoron in the best of times, but particularly in these —have seemed desperately inadequate. Yet there are difficult choices to make when you are, on the one hand, trying to protect people from the risk of infection and, on the other, providing for the cure of souls, our solemn charge.
It is not the first
