Public Health and the Politics of Catholic Practice: The Narrative Divide Between “Good Religion” and “Bad Belief”

I am applying for the Graduate Student Award.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the diversity of religious experience in the United States. Among Catholics this occurred as we observed how parishes responded to stay-at-home mandates, risk mitigation policies, and digital Mass. Some Catholic parishes supported such policies, framing them within the Catholic social ethics tradition and seeking to prevent the spread of illness and death. Other Catholics did not support these policies and experienced them as disenfranchising them, forcefully removing them from the Mass and sacraments. 

With such different reactions from parishes within the same tradition scholars must ask, what factors shaped how Catholic parishes experienced COVID-19 public health policies, such as stay-at-home orders and risk mitigation policies? An attending question is, how have public health actors and the public broadly been shaped to perceive and react to Catholics during the pandemic? To examine these questions, I analyze 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I completed with two different Catholic congregations in a metropolitan area in New England, described below.

Theoretically I draw on Arthur Frank’s “restitution narrative” which can be summarized as “I was healthy yesterday, I am sick today, and I will be healthy again tomorrow.” This narrative is frequently utilized in biomedical settings and, I argue on a social level, among public health actors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently scholars in the public health humanities have examined narratives of public health and a new concept of “prevention narratives” has been presented in the literature. This is the concept I engage here, blending it with Frank’s restitution narrative in my analysis of St. Sebastian’s parish.

St. Sebastian’s parish is the most progressive Catholic parish I have ever experienced. The parish hosts ministries for divorced and LGBTQ+ Catholics, which have drawn many of these Catholics to the parish where they feel welcome. The first Mass I attended where a lay woman preached the homily an interlocutor shared “we turn off the livestream when women preach so we don’t get reported to the bishop again.” The parish also engaged in social distancing and risk mitigation practices both above and beyond the requirements of public policy. At the time of my fieldwork in Jan-June 2024 they still had a number of parishioners who wore masks as well as the balcony designated as a mask required space—a requirement that I observed the priests enforce, even pausing during their homilies to look up into the balcony, make eye contact with someone, and make a motion to pull up their mask. The church had more hand sanitizer available than holy water and had even bought special, nice looking, refillable dispensers for it so that wasn’t in the disposable bottles. Hand sanitizer was used by all the Eucharistic Ministers before distributing Holy Communion. 

St. Gregory’s parish is a traditional Latin mass parish. I engaged in fieldwork there from July-Dec 2024. Even during the summer all the men wore pants, and many wore full suits, with limited air conditioning. Women wore long dresses and most covered their heads. Holy Communion was taken on the tongue kneeling at the partition between the altar and the congregation. The parish engaged in some risk mitigation when they received guidance, and often at minimum standards. Fr. Gregory (pseudonym) shared that when stay-at-home orders began he started doing private Masses outdoors, but was reprimanded for these. He tried to leave the church open for individual prayer and again was reprimanded. After two letters from local public health authorities he had the parish’s lawyer write back to the public health office explaining how the parish was fulfilling the minimum public health policies. This seems to have ceased the reprimands but did not ease the tension between the parish and public health actors, nor with the surrounding community, who would come and take pictures of the Mass, trying to get the parish in trouble.

I argue that we can understand the differences in experience and disenfranchisement, as St. Gregory’s parish was told at various points to cease activities until a lawyer stepped in, by examining the narratives that the parishes, public health actors, and public used to interpret the pandemic. Public health actors, a large part of the (liberal) public, and St. Sebastian’s used a variation of Frank’s restitution narrative that was adapted from an illness narrative to a prevention narrative. It stated, “The world was safe yesterday, the virus is here today, with public health prevention the world will be safe tomorrow.” Because St. Sebastian’s drew on this narrative, mixed with an emphasis on Catholic Social Ethics, they embraced collective responsibility through public health compliance; they were all using the same interpretive narrative framework and were in this together.

Yet, St. Gregory’s parish was not using the restitution narrative. They were engaging a narrative that focused on maintaining links to the past through the Latin Mass and Eucharist. Their narrative embraced a pre-Vatican II form of Catholicism and thus was not exactly aligned with other parishes and did not make interpretive sense to public health actors using socio-biomedical frameworks. They asserted religious autonomy and resisted state intervention.

Finally, I engage secularism studies, who examine secularism as a social discourse that differentiates what is “good religion” and what is “bad belief.” I argue that because St. Sebastian utilized a similar narrative framework and embraced public health’s collective responsibility they were discursively labeled “good religion.” St. Gregory’s was labeled “bad belief” because they claimed autonomy and the importance of religious practice over public health and resisted public health policy interventions, although they did adhere to minimums set in public policy when they were made aware of it. Their narratives were degraded to “belief” because they were not the same as public health actors, or the general public. Thus, they were disenfranchised. It is important to examine how public health actors are shaping American religions, health, and healing through narratives and discursive practice.