On October 2, 2020, the Center co-hosted a webinar, “Law, Religion, and Coronavirus in the United States: A Six-Month Assessment.” Center Co-Director Mark Movsesian moderated one of the webinar’s panels, “Religious Organizations.” The following post, by Christopher Lund, Professor of Law at Wayne State University Law School, was one of the panel presentations. For other Webinar presentations, please check out the websites of BYU’sInternational Center for Law & Religion Studies and Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion.

Quarantines, Religious Groups, and Some Questions About Equality

By Christopher Lund

When the government imposes quarantine orders for public safety, shutting some places down and leaving other places open, how should it treat religious organizations and religious services?  A natural answer is that religious organizations should be treated equally.  And that makes sense.  Equality is a solid moral principle, with wide-ranging appeal and deep roots in history and in law.

But equality is not self-executing.  And the deeper one goes into these quarantine orders, the more that becomes apparent.  We are trying to treat religion equally, but we don’t quite know how.  I’m planning a longer piece that will go into more details.  But for this blog post, let me simply try to demonstrate two things to you.  First, quarantine schemes require judgments about the value of religious exercise—which is uncomfortable in a system like ours, which tries to keep the government out of such questions.  And second, by insisting that all gatherings of all religious organizations be treated the same way, quarantine schemes become blind to genuine religious differences.  We are deciding how much to restrict religious organizations in general by imagining what happens in a religious service, but our imagined religious service ends up looking a lot like a Sunday morning Christian worship service. 

On October 2, 2020, the Center co-hosted a webinar, “Law, Religion, and Coronavirus in the United States: A Six-Month Assessment.” Center Co-Director Mark Movsesian moderated one of the webinar’s panels, “Religious Organizations.” The following post, by Mary Ann Case, the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at University of Chicago Law School, was one of the panel presentations. For other Webinar presentations, please check out the websites of BYU’s International Center for Law & Religion Studies and Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion.

Covid and Egalitarian Catholic Women’s Movements

By Mary Anne Case

In his March 27, 2020 extraordinary message Urbi et Orbi, Pope Francis insisted that the time of coronavirus was “not the time of [God’s] judgement, but of our judgement: a time to choose what matters and what passes away, a time to separate what is necessary from what is not.” The injunction “to seize this time of trial as a time of choosing” offered by the Pope came at what may have been a providential time for egalitarian Catholic women’s movements.  As the pandemic closed church buildings worldwide, and both the women and the priests went home and on line, the effect was to energize and unite the former while isolating the latter.  As priests celebrated mass alone, women organized worldwide mixed sex, women-centered participatory Zoom liturgies, and worshipped in house churches and in communities of nuns without benefit of clergy.   The choices made during the pandemic may have lasting consequences for both the clergy, who may find it increasingly difficult to overcome their isolation and reconnect with their flock, and the women and their supporters, who seem increasingly disinclined to go back rather than forward.

Two video images capture for me the stark choice offered to Catholic feminists in this time of choosing.  The first is of Pope Francis, alone in the middle of a vast, fenced-off, rain-drenched St. Peter’s Square delivering the afore-mentioned Urbi et Orbi blessing to the city of Rome and to the world.  He is flanked by a holy icon of the Virgin and a crucifix, and accompanied only by a handful of male clergy. The singing that accompanies him consists exclusively of male voices, reminding the listener of longstanding bans on women’s singing in church.  Visible in the distance, pressed up against the gates, are a small number of the faithful (or merely curious) sheltering under umbrellas.  This brought back the memory of other occasions when women were literally as well as figuratively fenced out.  For example, in 2018, during the Synod on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment, several dozen women and men protesting the failure to grant voting rights to any woman at the synod stood outside the gates that led to the synod hall, chanting  “Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “More than half the church.”  Their protests attracted the direct attention of more police than synod fathers.