Recovering from COVID-19: A tale of three parishes

It’s been three years since the COVID-19 health crisis sent everyone in the tri-state area home to socially distance themselves for two weeks.

Those two weeks turned into two months, then into two years before the state of emergency was declared over in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Houses of worship - by their very nature, places where people come together - had to scramble to find ways to minister to their congregants while navigating a slew of health regulations, including restrictions on indoor gatherings.

Shored up by faith and assisted by technology, religious leaders across the region took unprecedented measures in unprecedented times, all in the name of ensuring that their congregations had access to services and ministries.

We look at three Catholic churches, what they did during the pandemic and what they are doing now.

Now Streaming: Mass on Zoom

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down in March 2020, Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in Branchville, N.J.; Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in Hewitt, N.J.; and the Church of St. Patrick in Highland Mills, N.Y., took a similar approach to provide Mass to their congregants: If the congregation couldn’t come to the church, then the church would stream online to the congregants.

Using Zoom, Facebook Live videos and YouTube channels, all three parishes successfully brought services and Sunday school to their flocks, albeit virtually, until they were allowed to reopen their doors in May 2020.

Fast forward three years, and these churches find themselves on very different trajectories.

St. Patrick’s, a staple of the southeast Orange County community since the early 1900s, is facing a severe restriction of services. This includes a proposed merger with Sacred Heart parish in Monroe, N.Y., and elimination of religious education classes, which once boasted an enrollment of more than 900 children. St. Patrick’s had one of the region’s only special-education faith formation programs.

A final decision on the church’s future is in the hands of the Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

Unhappy parishioners met to discuss the changes March 22, and parish priest Father David Rider released a special letter to the congregation on Palm Sunday.

In his letter, Father David assured parishioners that the church would be available for weddings and funerals, although regular Masses and all other sacraments would be moved to Sacred Heart as of July.

The priest, who came to St. Patrick’s in last July, assured parishioners that despite the transitions ahead, he is available to assist with their needs.

“I know that this is a change for all of you who consider St. Patrick’s your spiritual home, and change is never easy,” he wrote. “I trust that God will see us through this difficult transition and that together, we will help each other through it. Please know that I am here for you and that I stand ready to do anything I can to help you find healing and peace.”

The partial closure of St. Patrick’s is not entirely because of the pandemic, although declining attendance in its wake may have played a partial role.

The merger with Sacred Heart is one of many parish mergers throughout the Northeast and the United States, as the Catholic church struggles with a shortage of priests.

Catholic schools also have been victims of staffing and resource shortages, including a recent announcement that a dozen schools in New York City will close after this school year.

Facebook, families, faith formation

At Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in Hewitt, the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass still streams on Facebook, although the church’s doors have been back open since May 2020.

A parishioner for more than four decades, Caryl Romeo, director of religious education there, said the livestream is a lifeline for many homebound church members.

“Before Covid, we never shut our doors, never did anything virtual. But we can’t take it away now. It’s excellent for the elderly and sick to have access to Mass. One member told me it’s something for her husband to look forward to every week.”

Still, Romeo worries that the ease of watching the livestream may be keeping away families who could participate not only in the CCD programming but also in the many other services that the parish provides for younger members.

“We have a really energetic young priest now,” she said, referring to Father Kamil Stachowiak. “And he has a lot of ideas for events and ministries that appeal to families.”

The church’s food pantry is open four days a week to serve its members, and it also hosts a school for Passaic County’s sizable Polish immigrant community. A Mass is held in Polish each week, although those services are not livestreamed.

“For the Polish children and the English-speaking children, it’s important for them to have consistency in their religious education,” Romeo said. “We want to see families join and stay. We even held virtual CCD for a year. Unfortunately, we see a lot of children make their First Communion in second grade and not come back until it’s time for their Confirmation classes in seventh grade.”

Romeo, who also serves as a Eucharistic minister, wants people to know that the church is balancing the rituals of the Mass with precautions to keep people healthy.

“We sanitize our hands thoroughly before distributing the Eucharist, and we’ve eliminated the communal wine chalice,” she said, “People are still welcome to wear masks and sit separately as they feel comfortable. We just want congregants to come back and be part of the church family again.”

She is encouraged by the turnout for the parish’s Palm Sunday services and Easter Egg Hunt and hopes that it’s a sign of an increasing trend of in-person church attendance.

“We had 70 to 80 families here for Mass and the egg hunt so it was quite the full church. I’m just praying that the crowds don’t dissipate again after Easter.”

Open-air and traveling ministries

At the region’s other Our Lady Queen of Peace, in Branchville in Sussex County, Father Philip-Michael Tangorra credits hard work, a large backyard and an influx of young families for his parish’s sustenance and growth during and after the pandemic.

“In the early days, we had to close down our facilities, just like everyone else,” he said. “So we set up the livestream for Mass and made sick calls throughout the parish. But we opened the doors again at our first opportunity. People needed our ministries.”

The church sits on a large, flat property along State Route 206, which allowed the parish to hold open-air Masses to avoid the limits on indoor gatherings.

“We could have only had 50 people inside,” the priest said. “But we were able to have hundreds outside on the field. It helped us find a balance between providing services and keeping people separated.”

Although the church returned to Zoom during the Omicron surge in the winter of 2021-22, it’s been business as usual since then, Tangorra said. He prefers not having the livestream.

“Although it’s unfortunate that we may have lost some elderly parishioners, I’m still able to go to them. We visit each nursing home in the parish once a week for Mass and Eucharist, and I make house calls, too,” he said.

“I can perform Mass and provide the Eucharist right in someone’s home. We have the resources to do that, but with the livestream, I felt like I had to minister to the whole universe instead of just my parish. It was necessary to a certain point, but I need to ensure that our church is a vibrant facility for our people here in Branchville, Augusta, Frankford and Lafayette.”

Tangorra thinks the parish’s dedication to supporting each other during the pandemic significantly influenced the current growth trend. The parish has more than 200 new young families and now has a congregation with more than half younger than age 50.

That goes against data from many quarters, including the Pew Research Center, which shows that the number of people leaving Catholicism is as many as six and a half times the number of people joining the religion, especially among Gen Z, Gen Y and Millennials.

Now the church’s most popular Mass is the Children’s Mass, Tangorra said, and it has added new ministries, such as Focusing Families on Christ, to support the burgeoning young congregants.

The priest is happy with the direction that his parish is headed.

“COVID gave people a reason to turn towards their faith and come together as a family,” he said. “We made a lot of phone calls to check on people, did a lot of outreach into the community. We have active young families to help build the church. People are hungry for the faith, and we’re finding ways to deliver on that. If you work a little harder reaching out to people, faith will draw people in.”