Hardly had Catholics in England and Wales accepted the new reality of Masses being celebrated behind closed doors than the bishops of England and Wales announced that churches would be closed even outside of service times, preventing the faithful from praying privately there.

As Westminster’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols explained yesterday:

“What is clear to me onto my fellow Bishops and to the prime minister is that we must now close our churches. It's not essential for people to travel, to go to church in order to pray – we have to learn more and more that our prayer is rooted in our hearts and can be shared with our families. Open churches will only tempt people to travel and that is not good practice.”

Our bishops are not saying that our churches are not privileged places of prayer, places where we can pray in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, but they are trying their best to protect the Faithful and to help us protect others, playing our part “in stopping the spread of this virus, in helping to protect and get the best use out of the NHS, and therefore save precious lives”.

Some have responded to rulings such as that of our bishops or even the Government’s decision to close pubs with understandable indignation, pointing to comments such as those of C.S. Lewis decades ago when in ‘On Living in an Atomic Age’ he reflected on life in the shadow of the atomic bomb and observed that human life and civilisation are always precarious things, 

“It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

There is wisdom here, and an important lesson about how we as Christians can and should live in our new frightening circumstances, but it is equally important to grasp how our viral threat differs from that of new weapons of mass destruction.  If we are to defeat this threat, we cannot live our lives as though its threat is not real. 

Given how Covid-19 works and spreads, the alternative to the kinds of containment strategies decided upon by our bishops and our government is to risk overloading the NHS with thousands – even hundreds of thousands – of elderly and vulnerable people, with multitudes dying as a result, many alone, many even without anaesthetics to alleviate their suffering. It is true that as Christians we can – and sometimes should – risk our lives for the sake of others, but we would be defying our Lord if we were to risk the lives of others simply for the sake of our own personal prayer lives, when we have the option of praying for them and protecting them from our own homes.

As Catholics we recognise that even the most vulnerable of us, the kind of people so easily overlooked in our modern ‘throwaway society’, are made in the image of God, and so we must be willing to sacrifice even such profound goods as prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament if doing so will protect the elderly, the disabled, and the sick.

As the cardinal said in his message yesterday, we should not be looking for loopholes to get around this, but instead should heed St Paul’s call for us to be good citizens. “Today we are to be good citizens, playing our part in the protection of the vulnerable in the support for the NHS and in the preserving of human life which is so precious to God in the face of this virus,” he said. 

In the meantime, Cardinal Nichols urged, Catholics should try to use this time as an opportunity to deepen our prayer life, and draw closer to God and to each other, even ending phone conversations with family members by praying together. 

Over the centuries, the Church has built up a great deal of experience in self-isolation, and even in life without the Sacraments. The Irish Cistercians of Mount St Joseph Abbey at Roscrea, for instance, have boiled down some of their experiences of self-isolation into four concrete tips that have served the order for almost a thousand years.

1. “Write down a weekly schedule. It needn't be too complex or specific. In fact, it's important that you don't regiment yourself so much that you become like a soldier. But having a basic schedule will structure your week and give you the time and freedom to live a productive life. You may want to colour-code the entries according to whether they are daily, weekly or monthly occurrences.

2. Add at least two structured prayer sessions to this. They needn't be for more than ten minutes. Set aside a quiet place, and a good time, and make this your chosen meeting place with God.

3. Read! We may have a wonderful library, as in the picture, but everyone can have access to books if they want. Many online stores are still operating.

4. Try to live in the present moment. One of the thoughts that short-circuits self isolation is the 'What-to-do-next' thought. It makes you restless, unable to engage with staying in one place. Your weekly schedule is a good start, here. And books will give you a mental 'space' to lose yourself in.”

By now, Cardinal Nichols said, we ‘re reflecting on our experiences of participating in Mass remotely, through digital streaming, for instance. Some churches have reported online congregations far larger than would normally be present in the flesh, he said, and he has been told about families preparing for Masses together at home, and joining in with singing of hymns and so forth, while also making an important act of spiritual Communion by spiritually receiving the Lord into their hearts.

For those seeking to deepen and enrich their experience of Masses participated in digitally and spiritually, it is worth taking the advice of the Dominican Sisters of St Joseph in the New Forest, who have produced a short video detailing 5 Helpful Hints for participating in Mass remotely. Those who wish to join in with the sisters when they are at Mass or otherwise praying together can do so here and other services can be found elsewhere.

As Cardinal Nichols explained a few days ago, while our physical absence from Mass may pain us, it nonetheless allows us to pray in act of solidarity with others around the world who are denied regular Mass.

“You know many people around the world are deprived of Regular attendance at Mass,” he said.

“So let's have them in our hearts – those who are under persecution, those who are in violence, those who are in such remote places where a priest can rarely get. They learn through that abstinence from the Eucharist to love and treasure it even more, so when all this is done when we can move freely again, we’ll have a greater hunger for the Mass and that will be in a strange way one of the things that we've learnt.”