News - August 2020 RSS Feed

WHAT ARE YOUR SAFETY CONCERNS? One of our St. Helena Eagle Scout candidates, Pedroy Proctor, is asking for your help for his Eagle Scout Project on safety. He would like to know: “What are your greatest safety concerns where you live?” Please write down your concerns and either Email them to [email protected] or bring them to the St. Helena rectory. Or, you may telephone the rectory at 718-892-3232. Pedroy will collect the data and present a report at the August 31 43rd Poiice Precinct Sector E Build a Block Meeting, which will take place in front of the St. Helena Green Building at 7PM. Pedroy will also have a safety table there with information about various types and aspects of safety. Please let your friends and neighbors know about the community meeting. They can listen to information from the police on topics such as COVID 19 and the status of the men’s homeless shelter scheduled to open on Westchester Avenue and can inform them of issues of concern to themselves or the community. Everyone is invited to attend this important meeting. Refreshments will be served.

Catholic churches across the country have been open for up to four months since shelter-in-place orders were lifted. With approximately 17,000 parishes in America typically holding three or more weekend masses - and a greater number of daily masses - for the last 14 or more weeks - over one million public masses have been celebrated following guidelines to prevent the spread of the virus: in sum, follow the three W’s - watch your distance, wear your mask, and wash your hands.  The Good News: for Catholic churches following these guidelines, no outbreaks of COVID-19 have been linked to church attendance, even though we have examples - some described below - of asymptomatic, unknowingly infected individuals attending mass and other parish functions. Their attendance could have led to an outbreak if appropriate precautions were not followed, yet in each case, we found no evidence of viral transmission.