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This ministry is hosting a virtual retreat for infertile people on Mother’s Day

May 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 0

Denver Newsroom, May 8, 2020 / 05:29 pm (CNA).- Mother’s Day is going to look different for most families this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Catholics, some churches are in the process of slowly re-opening public Masses, but the dispensation from the Sunday obligation continues to stand, as the virus has not gone away and a cure or vaccine has yet to be found.

While most Catholics are eager to return to Mass, a small group of Catholics are relieved that they will not be sitting in a public pew this Mother’s Day.

“We actually heard from one woman who said, ‘I kind of feel badly about saying this, but I’m sort of glad that we won’t be in the pews this year for Mother’s Day,’” Ann Koshute, founder of Springs in the Desert Catholic ministry, told CNA.

“That’s something that we hear and that everybody I think on the team has experienced at one point in this journey,” she said – the desire to avoid Mass on Mother’s Day. That’s because Koshute, along with other members of her ministry, have had painful experiences with infertility, and the customary Mother’s Day blessing given to mothers at many parishes that day can bring their grief and sense of loss poignantly to the fore.

“I think that so often people in our own families, our friends, and even our pastors don’t really understand the full extent of the pain and the grief or even the full extent of the issue of infertility, of how many couples are really dealing with it,” she said.

The pain of infertility, and the lack of resources available to Catholics on the subject, was why Koshute and her friend, Kimberly Henkel, founded Springs in the Desert, a Catholic ministry to spiritually and emotionally support women and couples experiencing infertility and infant loss. Originally, Henkel and Koshute, who have both experienced infertility, thought they might write a book. But they decided to start with a ministry website and a blog that could bring people together and allow for other women and couples to share their experiences. The group is relatively new, and held its first retreat in Philadelphia in December. They were set to hold a second one this weekend – Mother’s Day weekend – in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, when, well, the pandemic hit.

Now, they’ve moved the retreat online and opened it up to Catholics across the country – and they’ve been overwhelmed by the response.

“We thought that we would be really excited if maybe a couple dozen people found out about it and came. We are over 100 participants now. And it’s free and it’s going to be available all weekend,” Koshute said. The retreat is trying to address the emotional and spiritual experience of infertility and loss for a broad range of people, Henkel said – from mothers who have miscarried, to women who are past child-bearing years and still grieving the loss of infertility, to women “who feel like their biological clocks are ticking and just haven’t met the right guy.” But now that it’s a virtual, pre-recorded, watch-at-your-leisure retreat, it also has the potential to reach a population that is often more reluctant to gather in groups and talk about their experiences of infertility: men. “It’s mostly women who are emailing us (about the retreat), although we know that many of their husbands will watch with them. But we’ve also had a few men email us,” Koshute said.

“One in particular, it just really touched my heart. And he said that he was searching the web for help for his wife on Mother’s Day. And I was just so filled with praise and thanksgiving to God for that, for a husband to see that hurt in his wife and to want to find a way to help her,” she added. Men and women typically experience the grief of infertility quite differently, Koshute noted. “For us women, it’s so visceral because life is conceived within us and we carry that life. But for a man, it’s so different,” she said.

“(Men are) kind of distant from that experience until the child is actually born. And so I think many times men, the grief and the burden that they carry is their wife’s. They really carry her sadness and I think feel at a loss because they want to make everything right. They want to fix this, and they want to make her whole. And the mystery of infertility is that it’s not that simple. And that’s one of the things that makes it so difficult,” she said. Henkel said she experienced her own difficulties in trying to discuss infertility with her husband. Now that they’ve experienced the joy of growing their family through adoption, she said, he is much more open to inviting other men to share their experiences. Henkel said she is hoping that an additional benefit of this retreat being online is that it will facilitate discussions between couples watching the videos together. Both Henkel and Koshute said that while the experience of infertility and loss is painful, and they want to help couples acknowledge and accept that pain, they also want Springs in the Desert to be a positive and supportive experience for couples and women, where they can find hope and redemption even in their suffering. One of the topics they focus on is how all women are called to motherhood in their lives, whether it is spiritual or biological.

“My experience has shown me that my motherhood is really engaged in so many ways that I never considered before,” Koshute said.

“Not just with my godson or with other children in my family, but with women who are older than I who are friends and who might come to me with a difficulty or problem and I can help them,” or by helping family members in need or through charitable works, she added. “That’s one of the messages that we try to get across to women and to couples as well, that those kinds of things, what we would maybe refer to as spiritual motherhood, is not illegitimate,” she said.

“It’s not second-place. It’s a real way of engaging and living out our motherhood. It’s also not a replacement for a baby. So it’s not as if you go out and volunteer in your community and now you won’t have this longing for a child anymore. But we’ve really found through our own experience and through talking with other women that the more we kind of put ourselves out there and give ourselves to others, the more that we can begin to see that motherhood enacted in us.”

Henkel said she also likes to encourage couples to look at the ways God is calling them to be fruitful in their marriages outside of biological children.

“We really encourage these couples that they are not forgotten, they’re not being punished. That God loves them so much and that he has something amazing for them. He’s using this to draw them near to him and to allow them to cry out to him and ask for him to guide them, to lead them, to give them his love and show them what fruitfulness he has for them, what place in ministry and mission he has for them.” Henkel and her husband in particular like to share with couples their experience of foster care as one example of where God might be calling them to be fruitful. After a frustrating and expensive experience with some adoption agencies, Henkel and her husband decided to look into giving a home to children through foster care.

“Here is a situation where these children really need families,” she said. “It’s hard because there’s no guarantee you’re going to get to keep this child, so there’s a sense of this new greater level of having to learn how to trust God.” “I think that with a couple discerning that fruitfulness, it’s also discerning – where is God really calling you? There’s so much need in this world. And he wants to use us.”

Couples interested in the Springs in the Desert Mother’s Day weekend retreat can sign up for free online at the Springs in the Desert website. Content will be uploaded and available for anyone who registers, Henkel said, even if they register late. The retreat team will also be hosting a live talk on Sunday, May 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern on the ministry’s Facebook page.

“There’s a place for you in Springs of the Desert,” Henkel added. “There’s so many women who have reached out to us in Philly. We added several more women to our group, to our team, our official team, women who came to the retreat. One woman had come there and she said she had had a miscarriage, and neither one of us has experienced that. So we said, please join us. We want your voice.”

“We’re trying to really bring the voices of many different women to our team so that people will feel there is somebody that is talking they can really relate to. Because there are all of these different situations, but they’ve got obviously a very similar undercurrent.”

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News Briefs

Thousands of Catholic parishes find relief in government payroll loans 

May 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 1

CNA Staff, May 8, 2020 / 04:15 pm (CNA).- As parishes and dioceses across the country deal with a drop in collections and the prospects of layoffs amid the pandemic, many parishes have managed to avail themselves of government loans designed to cover eight weeks of payroll expenses.

CBS News reported Friday that an estimated 12,000-13,000 of the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the U.S. had applied for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) payroll loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA), and 9,000 so far had received them.

Guidance from the SBA on eligibility for the loans states that “no otherwise eligible organization will be disqualified from receiving a loan because of the religious nature, religious identity, or religious speech of the organization.”

Religious organizations are eligible for the loans as long as they meet the requirements of Section 501(c)(3) nonprofit and employ 500 or fewer people, the SBA said.

“The PPP isn’t about the federal government assisting houses of worship or churches,” Pat Markey, the executive director of the Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference, told CBS News.

“PPP is about keeping people on payrolls, and a large segment of our society [in] the not for profit world…are churches and houses of worship. And they have people on payrolls too. So, if what this is about is keeping people on payrolls, then we all should have availability to do that.”

The Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference did not reply by press time to CNA’s request for additional comment.

Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act March 27 to help relieve the economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

The CARES Act initially authorized some $350 billion in loans to small businesses, intended to allow them to continue to pay their employees. The loans were given on a first come, first serve basis.

The second round of funding, with some $310 billion in additional funds available, began April 27.

The loans were capped at $10 million, were open to businesses with fewer than 500 employees per location, and were intended to cover two months of payroll costs.

The federal government promised to forgive the loans if a business used at least 75% of the funds to maintain its payroll at “pre-pandemic levels” for eight weeks after the loan is disbursed, the New York Times reports.

The remaining money could be used only to pay for certain expenses, such as a mortgage, rent, and utilities, according to the Times.

A survey of Protestant pastors by LifeWay Research found that about 40% had applied for PPP loans with more than half of them reporting being approved.

NPR reports that synagogues have also applied for government funding, though in a smaller proportion— of nearly 4,000 synagogues in the United States, about 250 were approved for PPP loans in the first round of lending, according to surveys by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

The PPP has been subject to some criticism since its launch, including from those who say business owners with criminal records have been excluded from the program thus far.

In addition, several large companies, such as Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, have received multi-million dollar loans through the program. Some of these large companies, such as Shake Shack, have since returned their loans.

Two New York dioceses— Rochester and Buffalo— are suing the Small Business Administration for access to PPP funds, after they were denied loans because of their bankruptcy status.

An SBA rule stipulated that the funds would not go to bankruptcy debtors. Both the dioceses of Rochester and Buffalo have filed for bankruptcy in the past several months, after being named in hundreds of clergy sex abuse lawsuits filed under New York Child Victims Protection Act.

 

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No Picture
News Briefs

How some parishes are slowly bringing back public Masses

May 8, 2020 CNA Daily News 0

Denver Newsroom, May 8, 2020 / 02:59 am (CNA).- On Sunday, March 15, Nebraskans in the Diocese of Lincoln still had a choice of whether or not they wanted to attend Mass and risk possible exposure to coronavirus.

By the next day, they didn’t. Public Masses in the diocese were canceled, as they soon were throughout the country due to the pandemic.

Now that curves of infection are “flattening” and hospitals have had a chance to ramp up their capacity and supplies, many dioceses, including Lincoln, are slowly reopening Masses to the public. What exactly that will look like varies a lot depending on each parish’s unique spaces and limitations. 

Archbishop George Lucas, currently serving as acting bishop of Lincoln, has followed guidelines from Governor Pete Ricketts in issuing some general guidance for re-starting public Masses. Ultimately, however, he left the decision to reopen up to each individual parish.

One place that has been offering public Masses as of Monday, May 4, is St. Wenceslaus parish in Wahoo, Nebraska, a town of 4,500 people located in the Diocese of Lincoln.

Fr. Joseph Faulkner, the pastor of St. Wenceslaus in Wahoo, said he decided to reopen public Masses at his parish after meeting virtually with the other priests in his area. The Masses, of course, will look quite different than normal – with limited capacity, social distancing, and precautions like no holy water, no hymnals, and no sign of peace.

And in many ways, Faulkner said he is encouraging his parishioners to act like it’s the weekend of March 14-15 again.

“From the get-go, we’re telling people – you need to make a decision. I even put in my message (to parishioners), think back to – it’s March 14th and you’re trying to make a decision. Whatever decision you made then is probably still the right decision. If you need to be extra careful for yourself, for your family, for your parents, for your coworkers, for your patients you see in the nursing home, stay away,” he said.

Parishes in the cities of Lincoln and Omaha decided to wait to reopen, Faulkner said. Lincoln has a re-opening date of May 11 for non-essential businesses, and the size of Omaha parishes made re-opening at this point very difficult. Although Wahoo sees a lot of traffic from Lincoln and Omaha and other surrounding towns, Faulkner said he thought he could use appropriate precautions to make reopening safe at his parish.

“St. Wenceslaus specifically is lucky. We’ve got a nice big basement, so that gets you another 30%-40% seating room. We’ve got three priests, which is really lucky. So from five weekend Masses, we’re going up to eight, so we can do more to spread our people out.”

Faulkner said he has even offered to other parishes with just one priest that he can send someone to help them out if they are offering extra Masses for social distancing and are feeling burned out.

For attendance and seating, Faulkner said he is blocking off every other pew and is going to stagger families in order to maintain six feet of distance. Instead of having people call or sign up online, Faulkner said he is hoping that the extra Mass times, the use of the basement space, as well as the people who choose to stay home, will be enough to maintain an appropriately staggered congregation.

Faulkner said he has been grateful to have public weekday Masses before the weekend to work out some of the kinks of the new restrictions. For example, he’s still working on his communion line protocol, he said. He tried a method using the side aisles and then the center aisle at his first Mass on May 4th, and “it was horrible. So I’m going to fix that tomorrow.”

Masks during communion have also been tricky.

“It’s really hard to say Mass with a mask on, and then I have to make my Communion, I have to receive,” Faulkner said. The priests were donated some N95 masks, which Faulkner tried to use on Monday, but the straps made it hard to quickly receive communion and readjust the mask without touching his face or his glasses, he said, so he’s hoping to find a different kind of mask by the weekend.

From his parishioners, Faulkner said he has seen a variety of attitudes toward the closing, and now re-opening, of public Masses.

“There’s really three camps,” he said. “There’s the, yes, amen, be safe, meditate-on-the-saints-who-didn’t-have-the-Eucharist-for-years group.”

“Then there’s definitely the middle group, which is like, I don’t want to take any risks, but I want the first available ‘okay’ to go to Mass,” he said.

“And then there’s the, ‘I’m 85. If I die because I went to Mass, thank God’ crowd. Literally the people who are most cavalier are the older ones,” Faulkner said.

A bishop’s perspective: Oklahoma

Archbishop Paul Coakley, the bishop of Oklahoma City, told CNA that Catholic parishes throughout the state will start celebrating public Masses again on May 18th, with their first public weekend Masses on May 23-24, the Feast of the Ascension.

In a May 7 letter to Oklahoma Catholics posted on the archdiocese’s website, Coakley recognized that while the past two months without Mass have been a painful time for many, God never abandoned his people.

“The gift of the Holy Spirit assures us of God’s continued presence in our lives. No matter the circumstance, he is with us. Perhaps the greatest sacrifice for the lay faithful these past few months has been fasting from Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity given to us in his real presence in the Eucharist. We pray that in this time of Eucharistic fasting, God has graced you with a profound hunger for this communion with Jesus and the members of his Body, the Church,” he stated.
 
The timing of reopening public Masses was chosen just before the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost “to remind us of God’s faithfulness and to prepare to celebrate the birth of our beloved Church on Pentecost,” he added.

The decision was reached through consultations with Bishop David Konderla of Tulsa, priest councils in the state, and medical experts, “including a prominent infectious disease specialist,” Coakley said.

“It won’t be business as usual,” he said.  “We will be celebrating public Mass and people will be able to come and they will be able to receive Holy communion, but the churches won’t be full. In fact, we’re limiting it to 33% of the occupancy capacity,” he noted.

“We’ve been very cautious watching the numbers and putting in place pretty strict guidelines to ensure that we were able to maintain social distances and practice the appropriate kind of hygiene,” he added.

A five page document released by the state’s Catholic dioceses details the exact guidelines, such as including 6-foot social distancing between pews, the recommendation that all attendees wear masks, and the recommendation that priests have plenty of hand sanitizer readily available throughout the church.

Coakley said the document offers guidelines for pastors while still giving them the flexibility to implement the recommendations and requirements in the way that works best for their unique parishes.

“If the church fills beyond capacity, we’re asking them to consider using other space in the parish, perhaps the parish hall, to be able to put overflow crowds and continuing to social distance properly, parking lots, things of that sort,” he said. “We’re going to have to rely upon the creativity of our pastors and they have been demonstrating a great deal of creativity up to now, so I’m sure they’ll continue to do so.”

Coakley said he is asking priests to also continue offering livestream Masses for people who will choose not to come to the public Masses at this time. He noted in his May 7 message that the dispensation from the Sunday obligation still stands for all Oklahoma Catholics at this time.

“We are dealing with an invisible threat to people’s lives, a virus that our brightest doctors and scientists are still figuring out. The ever-present temptation in our American culture is to want solutions immediately and to act quickly, because we want what we want, and we want it now. As a Church, we must proceed more deliberatively,” he said.

Coakley told CNA that while he understands Catholics’ fear, anger and frustration during these past two months of suspended Masses, he also encouraged them to think of their time away as a way of serving others.

“We’re really living through a health crisis, a time of severe challenges, and it’s impacting us in so many ways economically, and in terms of social isolation, loneliness, the liturgy also. But I think we need to think beyond individual rights and consider also our responsibilities toward one another, especially the responsibility to love and serve one another, to be mindful of one another’s needs.”

Wichita, Kansas

On May 3, Bishop Carl Kemme of the Diocese of Wichita announced plans to reopen public Masses starting on Wednesday, May 6, following recommendations of the county’s local public health authorities.

Phase one of the guidelines will last until May 20, and they stipulate that parishes may hold Masses at no more than 33% capacity. Churches will use only one entrance, so that the number of people coming may be properly counted and seated, and six foot spacing should be clearly marked so that people can maintain social distance.

Mass attendees are encouraged to wear masks, and priests are required to wear them while distributing communion. Parishes are also encouraged to keep hand sanitizer available at entrances, and parishioners are “strongly encouraged” to receive communion in the hand.

Fr. Clay Kimbro is the parochial vicar at St. Anne’s parish in Wichita. Kimbro said he and the other priests of the diocese have been having weekly virtual talks with the bishop about when to re-open Masses and what that might look like, and so priests were able to give feedback as to what guidelines they thought would work well.

At St. Anne’s, which has 1,200 families, Kimbro and his leadership team have been meeting and working on logistical things, like roping off every other pew so that Mass attendees can maintain proper distancing.

He said he has also had extra meetings with his ushers, who on the weekends will “seat everyone so that they can make sure that the distance is maintained. That’s a lot more responsibility than our ushers are normally given.”

Kimbro said the parish is not having parishioners sign up for Masses online. Instead, if more people show up than the allowed 33%, the overflow congregation will be directed to the school’s auditorium, where a second priest – either Kimbro or his pastor – will celebrate a concurrent Mass, also with social distancing protocols in place.

“We were a little leery of (adding Mass times), because when you add Mass times, it’s hard to take them back,” Kimbro said. “Also, it’s hard to turn people away. They come to the door at 10 a.m. for Mass, and we say, ‘Come back at 1:00 p.m.’ Well, it’s a lot easier to say, ‘Go over to the auditorium.’”

Kimbro said the parish is working on decorating the auditorium to make it an appropriate place to have Mass, and they are also putting down tape lines to direct traffic and to mark distances.

“There’s a lot of work in planning, and it can be a little overwhelming, but we’re overall just really excited to see people again,” he said.

St. Anne’s parishioners have been “all over the map” in terms of their eagerness to return to Mass at this time, Kimbro said. Some have been signing up to read at Mass, or to usher or distribute communion, because they miss Mass so much and they want to be involved.

Others are a bit more anxious, Kimbro said, and he has encouraged those people to attend weekday Masses, where there are likely to be fewer people.

He also added that the Sunday obligation continues to be dispensed for everyone, as Bishop Kemme made clear in his May 3 announcement.

“I do want to emphasize that the current pandemic is far from over. Medical experts tell us that this health crisis remains a very serious threat to the lives of many people,” Kemme stated.

“Because of this, I want to urge all those in the high risk population and others who so choose to continue to use the general dispensation I am giving from the obligation to attend the Sunday celebration of the Mass, which continues indefinitely during this crisis. Please do not put yourself or others at risk by attending the Masses once they resume. This is my urgent appeal to all in our Catholic Community: use extraordinary caution and good judgment in determining if you should attend Mass. No mortal sin is committed if you decide that you and your family should not attend.”

Kimbro said that he is looking forward to having parishioners come back to Mass, even though it might not be the triumphant return that some may have envisioned just yet, with everyone packing in the pews like normal.

“I think everybody was hoping it would kind of be like this post-9/11 experience, where churches are packed and everybody recognizes that need (for God), but we’re tempering that, and it’s kind of like everything in this virus, right? Our expectations versus our reality – having to live in the reality of the moment and what we’re given and just go with that,” he said. 

“But then I looked at the Gospel for this Sunday that we’re back, and the first line is: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled.’ So that’s perfect.”

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