Father Scott Holmer on Friday sat on a chair in his church’s parking lot in Bowie, Maryland, administering confession to worshippers car by car, at times leaning forward as he struggled to hear them from the 1.8m distance imposed by social distancing rules.
After the Catholic church of St Edward the Confessor had to close its doors due to the coronavirus outbreak, Holmer said that he got the idea of offering drive-through confessions after learning about South Korea’s drive-through testing.
“Then I grabbed some cones, the sign and the chair, put them out in the parking lot and just sat there,” he told reporters.
Photo: AFP
Few cars stopped by earlier this week, but things changed after a video of the drive-through confessions went viral.
“Last night I just lost count,” Holmer said on Friday. “We went for about an hour, just hearing confessions coming through the line.”
If it rains, confession is canceled, the church’s Web site said.
Drive-throughs, drive-ins and similar initiatives are popping up across the US in an attempt to fill the void left by shuttered businesses, churches and other gathering places as US officials ordered strict restrictions to help contain the spread of coronavirus.
In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a library has transformed its parking lot into a makeshift drive-in where patrons can pick up books after placing their order online.
Customers still have to get out of their vehicle to collect the books, but gloved staffers sanitize all items before placing them on carts just outside the building, Great Barrington Libraries director Amanda DeGiorgis said.
The response so far has been “amazing,” she said. “People have called already, they’re so happy to have access to the books.”
Massachusetts has not yet told nonessential businesses to limit in-office personnel, but has prohibited gatherings of more than 25 people and on-premises consumption of food or drink at bars and restaurants, among other measures.
In Las Vegas, gentlemen’s club Little Darlings was not only staying open, but was planning to launch drive-through peep shows this weekend that customers can watch from their vehicles.
“As silly as it sounds, the world can’t stop turning for a cold, so we have to come up with something to cater to those guests who are a little more sensitive to the issues,” Little Darlings director of operations Ryan Carlson said by telephone.
Little Darlings was the only adult club still open in Las Vegas, Carlson said, but added that it was not immediately clear if the business would be able to keep operating after Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak on Friday announced on Twitter that he had issued an emergency declaration directing all nonessential businesses to close.
The club was implementing US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, with staffers washing their hands every 30 minutes, placing seats and booths at least 1.8m apart, providing touchless hand sanitizer dispensers for guests and conducting three rounds of deep sanitation every day, Carlson said.
“At the end of the day, the government is not going to provide a bailout to adult entertainment businesses or their workers,” he said. “So our people have to be able to provide for their families.”
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS