Mozambique: Elderly people should not attend church services

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Mozambique: Elderly people should not attend church services

8:42 CAT | 01 Sep 2020

FILE - Bus stop in Greater Maputo. [File photo: Lusa]

People over 65 years of age may not participate in collective acts of worship, according to a list of demands presented by the Mozambican authorities to religious bodies hoping to resume their activities, which have been severely curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Elderly people are believed to be particularly at risk from Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

The ban on attending services also extends to people under the age of 18. In the testing for the coronavirus in recent months, a surprisingly large number of children have tested positive.

The government also insists that no more than 50 people may attend any indoor religious service. Larger numbers are believed to make social distancing impossible.

Religious leaders from various congregations met in Maputo on Saturday to discuss how to resume collective worship safely. The spokesperson for the meeting, Mauricio Magune, told AIM “We know we had a certain way of behaving before the pandemic. But when the pandemic struck, we had restrictions, and this imposes on us a new way of behaving”.

Magune said one of the ways of resuming collective religious activities consists of each person assessing the mistakes he or she made in the pre-Covid-19 period, at family, social and professional level, in order to avoid them in the post-Covid-19 period.

“If we do this we shall guarantee in the best way that the resumption of our life of worshipping God is also marked as the start of a new way of relating to God and to other people”, he said.

He recognised that Covid-19 has worsened the adverse situation the country is passing through, and insisted that, to overcome this situation, Mozambicans must learn from the mistakes of the past.

Magune urged religious leaders not to spread “negative messages” during services. As examples of such negative messages, he cited certain pastors who talked of the impending “end of the world”, and others who preach that the faithful cannot be infected by the coronavirus.

Magune urged the government to speed up its inspection of churches, designed to check whether they are implementing the necessary measures to ensure that worship can go ahead safely. “The inspections are not flowing very quickly”, he said, “and many people already thirst to return to their places of worship”.

Source: AIM