Dear parishioners,

Many of you, no doubt, have heard that we have been given the permission to re-open the church for masses with a congregation, for no more than 50 people at a time, and with all kinds of rules to ensure safety.


The question then becomes: should we? At the parish office, we have struggled with this over the past few weeks. We have thought our way through every conceivable way there is of reducing attendance at Sunday masses from anywhere between five hundred and a thousand people down to fifty. We have concluded that it is simply impossible to achieve this without causing at best disappointment, and at worst, frustration and anger in far far more people than the fifty that we will please by letting them into the church for mass. 


The reason, in a nutshell, is numbers. And communication. A great many people who attend St. Mary’s have little or no tie to St. Mary’s. We have no email address for them. They do not go to our parish website, or to our Instagram page, or to our Facebook page, or to our YouTube channel. We have no way of communicating to them the system that we have come up with for receiving no more than fifty people who have signed in to attend a given mass. Therefore they will appear on Sunday, in many instances from far away, only to be told that they can’t go in because they haven’t signed up for this mass. I leave it to you to imagine what happens next. Consider, if you will, all the others who will be standing at the front of the church with them, wanting to get inside. Add to this the complexity of keeping track of who signs up for each mass in such a way as to ensure that as many different people as possible can attend mass, both on Sundays and on weekdays. Add again the necessity of cross-checking the list of those who have signed up for the next Sunday, say, 8:00 a.m. mass against all the lists of attendees at previous masses. This is so complex as to be close to impossible, given again the number of people we are dealing with. 


For all these reasons, we have chosen not to open the church for the attendance of clusters of fifty people for the time being. We didn’t come to this decision lightly. We have the blessing of the Archbishop. We will monitor the situation, and come back to you with an update on this decision some time in June. We hope and pray that you will understand the position we are in. God bless us and keep us all safe and well.  


– Fr. Guy