Coronavirus Covid-19: United Kingdom, next Sunday, Mass broadcast by card. Nichols on BBC Radio Four. And Churches will be reopening on Monday

A live Mass will be broadcast on BBC Radio Four, the first one since the lockdown was imposed on March 23rd. It will be celebrated on Sunday, June 14th, by card. Vincent Nichols, the Catholic primate of England and Wales, in Westminster Cathedral, in London. The occasion will be the Feast of Corpus Christi. While these last weeks many Catholic churches have successfully streamed their Masses, this is the first time a religious service is broadcast live on radio. Every week, an audience of nearly eleven thousand tune in on “Radio Four”, one of the most popular radio channels. Card. Nichols will celebrate behind closed doors, with no devotees, except for a co-celebrant and a lector, who will stay two metres apart. New guidelines have been sent by the British Government to all the bishops and priests, with the rules that need to be adhered to, to reopen the churches for personal prayer as from Monday, June 15th. Every parish priest must make sure there are two volunteers in the church to check that the devotees use hand sanitizer when they enter and leave the church and keep two metres apart. The churches shall also be sanitised once a day, and all books and leaflets shall be removed. The Bishops’ Conference wrote to the parish priests to encourage them to comply with the new rules, the only measure that can ensure the churches can be kept open.
Valentina Bombelli