Retreat Planning During COVID-19 Recovery

The CDC has given us clear and helpful guidelines for staying safe around others (click here to learn more). In general, here are the most important ways you can keep all of your people safe as you hold your retreats:

• Wash your hands often
• Avoid close contact
• Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others
• Cover coughs and sneezes
• Clean and disinfect

You'll need to establish a cleaning routine this time. Clean and disinfect after meals and at least at the end of each day. Focus on the bathrooms, door knobs and handles, main meeting area, the church pews, and the places where meals were served.

Everyone is handling this pandemic differently. Each person brings their own attitudes, beliefs, and situations to how they handle social interaction during COVID-19.

We’re still just getting back together after we’re through the worst of it. So it’s especially true that many of the people at your retreat will have different opinions and levels of comfort being there. For example, on one hand some people may think social distancing isn’t really even necessary any more. But others may still feel somewhat uncomfortable even with staying 6 feet apart.

For example: pastoral groups. Let’s say there’s a small group on your retreat that is meeting in the church. One person in the group says, “Hey, is social distancing really that necessary any more? Would everyone feel comfortable if we just scooted closer together for our groups? No one here is sick, right? It’s probably fine.” etc. This creates a situation where people that are not comfortable with this feel pressured to agree. This could also cause hesitation for group members to share, or even cause conflict within the group.

Normally you're trying to get as many retreatants as possible to attend. But it's different right now. As a parish you should intentionally limit the size for the safety of everyone attending (see the "Meeting spaces and rooms" section below for more information).

In fact, you may want to consider limiting your retreats to only about 10 retreatants. This would make managing your retreat with these guidelines more feasible. You could even consider doing more retreats with this smaller size, using the same team.

Watch this clip of a video we released not too long ago. It addresses the great spiritual fruits that can come from small retreats. Even retreats where no retreatants sign up at all...
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Plan

It’s important that your Retreat Coordinator, Pastor, and Main Evangelizer all agree on what standards and guidelines everyone will be expected to follow during the retreat. These should be clearly communicated in advance, even as soon as when you're accepting signups. These should also be clearly communicated at the beginning of the first day of the retreat.

You'll also need to decide as a parish whether or not you will require people to wear masks to the retreat. On one hand, this will help prevent the spread of germs and might make people feel a little safer at the retreat. On the other hand, it's very uncomfortable for people to wear them all day and might make it harder to hear and understand others as they speak. Start by reviewing the guidelines that your diocese and state have enacted, and go from there.

Communicate

It’s important that your Retreat Coordinator, Pastor, and Main Evangelizer all agree on what standards and guidelines everyone will be expected to follow during the retreat. These should be clearly communicated in advance, even as soon as when you're accepting signups. These should also be clearly communicated at the beginning of the first day of the retreat. It's also a good idea to give regular reminders during the retreat.

You’ll want the Main Evangelizer to address social distancing at the beginning of the retreat. Emphasize the importance of everyone taking personal responsibility for keeping adequate distance from one another, practicing good hand-washing, coughing/sneezing into the inside of your elbow, etc.

People may form friendships and bonds during this retreat that make them want to be physically closer, shake hands, or even hug. Please make it clear that this isn't acceptable at this time.

Be aware of how close you are to people in the main meeting area, during meals, mingling and socializing times, during bathroom breaks, etc. Everyone just needs to be a little more conscious of themselves. You may even need to give periodic reminders to retreatants individually or as a group.

It’s extremely important that everyone at the pre-retreat team meetings is practicing social distancing. If one team member comes down with COVID-19, you can still use all the other team members on the retreat as long as they’ve been practicing social distancing at those meetings. However, if you haven't been holding "safe" pre-retreat meetings and someone in the group comes down with COVID-19, everyone that has been in contact with them at those meetings must self-quarantine for 14 days, and may miss the retreat.

So be extra careful to have “safe” meetings before the retreat! This includes social distancing, proper hand-washing, etc.

Alternative to in-person meetings

We still recommend that the team holds in-person pre-retreat meetings to help them form close relationships and bond with each other. However, if you’re particularly nervous taking on this risk, then you can have video conference team meetings instead. This may make it harder for your team to bond, but it's a suitable exception considering the circumstances.

FDA Guidelines

For official and comprehensive food guidelines from the FDA, select the link below:
Food Safety and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Here is a particularly relevant passage from the FDA on distributing food in a group setting (which can be found at the link above):

Restaurants and retail food establishments are regulated at the state and local level. State, local, and tribal regulators use the Food Code published by the FDA to develop or update their own food safety rules. Again, there is no current evidence to support the transmission of COVID-19 associated with food or food packaging.

It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their mouth, nose, or possibly eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. The coronavirus is mostly spread from one person to another through respiratory droplets. However, it’s always critical to follow the 4 key steps of food safety—clean, separate, cook, and chill—to prevent foodborne illness.

As an extra precaution to help avoid the transmission of COVID-19 through surface contact, we recommend frequent washing and sanitizing of all food contact surfaces and utensils. Food-service workers also must practice frequent hand washing and glove changes before and after preparing food. Include frequent cleaning and sanitizing of counters and condiment containers. Consumers should wash their hands after using serving utensils.

In communities with sustained transmission of COVID-19, state and local health authorities have implemented social-distancing measures which discourage or prohibit dining in congregate settings. We also recommend discontinuing self-service buffets and salad bars until these measures are lifted.

Unlike foodborne gastrointestinal (GI) viruses like norovirus and hepatitis A that often make people ill through contaminated food, SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, is a virus that causes respiratory illness. Foodborne exposure to this virus is not known to be a route of transmission.

Tips for preparation and serving

If you have people preparing the food, they should maintain social distancing of 6 feet while preparing it, they should wear masks and gloves, and disinfect food preparation surfaces before and after. When preparing food, be sure to pre-package in plastic wrap, plastic bags, or containers for easy and safe serving. People should not be reaching into bowls or serving trays where they might touch food that others will eat (for example, don't put a bowl of apples on the table). As an alternative, you could order pre-packaged or pre-wrapped food from a caterer or restaurant.

Although it may create additional waste right now, you may want to consider using disposable dishes and utensils: paper plates and bowls, plastic utensils, plastic serving spoons, etc.
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We would caution you against having a buffet. With a buffet, people tend to be close together and are touching the same serving utensils and food.

Before and after meals, have your Hospitality team clean and disinfect the food surfaces from which the food was served. Don’t forget to buy paper towels and spray disinfectant!

Seating for meals

Seating your entire group around tables won't satisfy social distancing requirements. We recommend instructing people to eat in their chairs. If you're able to, you may also want to purchase some simple folding tables and set them up by their chairs for meal times.

With just a quick Google search, we found these available for $9 at Target. You could also ask them to bring their own folding table, if they have one. Normally there isn't room to put these next to each chair, but with additional spacing between chairs, you'll have the space. Not only is this convenient for meal times, but retreatants can place their drinks, snacks, journals, etc. on here during the retreat.

Personal water bottles

You might want to encourage each retreatant to bring their own water bottle. Have pitchers or water dispensers available for them to refill their bottles.

Main meeting Room

The best recommendation we can give you for this is to plan ahead before the retreat. Months in advance, try setting up chairs and seeing how many you can put in the main conference room, keeping them at least 6 feet apart.

Keep in mind though, that people will need to move around some. So you can’t completely fill your main meeting area with chairs 6 feet apart. Leave an adequate aisle, a more open area for socializing, etc.

Also, you may want to have your Main Evangelizer instruct everyone to keep the same chair all weekend.

For retreats during this time, it's likely that you'll need to secure a larger space than you usually use, or you may have to limit the number of retreatants to a smaller number.

If the weather is nice enough, you could also hold parts of the retreat outdoors. This will not only be a nice change of scenery, but it will make it easier to spread out and eliminate the need for disinfecting everything.

Meals

For ideas about how to handle meal times, see the "Food" section.

Team meetings (during retreat)

No tables are needed. Have everyone stand around the room, staying 6 feet apart. You may want to have the team meetings in the church proper, since there’s a lot of extra space there.

Pastoral Groups

Make sure you have additional spaces or rooms for people to meet in their groups where they can maintain social distancing.

Remember, since everyone in the group will be farther apart, they’ll likely be speaking louder. So make sure these additional meeting spaces have adequate distance between each other for the sake of privacy.

Church

We recommend asking everyone to sit at least 6 feet apart in the pews. In fact, each person can probably have their own pew to themselves.

Just remember to maintain 6 feet to the left and right within the same pew, but also maintain 6 feet in front and behind multiple rows of pews. In other words, remember that you're trying to keep a 6-foot circle around everyone, not just to their left and right.

One-on-one personal dialogues

Ensure the space you use for this enables each shepherd-retreatant pair has at least 6 feet between them and still allows for adequate privacy.

Sign-in table

Run by a single team member so everyone doesn’t touch the same pen or computer.

Reconciliation and Mass

Your parish already has a strategy for Reconciliation and Mass. Follow that.

Renewal of Baptism: Part 2

Normally you would use holy water for this liturgy. However, we do not recommend using holy water during this time.

Renewal of Confirmation

We recommend you do not have the team members touch the retreatants as they pray over them.

To accomplish this, spread out even more than usual when in the church. This will give the team room to pray over the retreatants from “afar," 6 feet apart from each other, and 6 feet apart from the other retreatants. If your church is smaller and you don’t have room to spread out more, have the team walk down the aisle and extend their hands over each of the retreatants from the side.

Candle bearers after Sunday Mass

Unfortunately, this is the one part of the retreat that you might consider eliminating during this time.

There's just too many people, unless your church is huge and you have more than enough space to at least double your numbers while maintaining social distancing. In this case, you might have all the candle bearers make a big circle around the church, instead of all gathering in the front. If you do have room in the church, make sure you're aware of the space where you'll gather them in the beginning, and where you'll have the fellowship gathering afterwards. This space must be large enough or you you'll have to refrain from inviting the guests to the fellowship. You'll also need to figure out a way to get lighted candles to all the guests without violating the 6-foot distancing guidelines.

As we said, this could become challenging to pull off, so it's okay to skip this part during this difficult time.

Commissioning Ceremony

The team shouldn’t put the crosses on the retreatants. Each retreatant should come pick up their own cross individually.

If you use a microphone for the speakers and witnesses, make sure it’s not a handheld microphone or a lapel microphone (i.e. wearable). Attach the handheld microphone to a microphone stand. If the stand must be adjusted or touched for any reason, have the Main Evangelizer be the designated person for this.

You may also want to have your speakers bring their own markers (if they need them), or have "dedicated" and labeled markers for each person who will be using them.

Although a circle is an ideal format to emulate the small group experience and allow people to see and talk to each other more easily, a circle with people 6 feet apart would be much too large for people to see and hear each other.

So unless you have a very small group, we recommend leaving your main meeting area set up the same way as it was for the rest of the retreat. The Main Evangelizer should instruct everyone to swivel in their chairs to the best of their ability when others are sharing.

If you're concerned this won't work well, another idea is to leave the chairs exactly as they are, but turn half of them around the other way. This way, one half of the group is facing the other half of the group, with the Main Evangelizer in the middle. This will reduce the amount of swiveling.

In general, we don't recommend distributing handouts. If you feel they're needed at any point, you can find some creative alternatives that include letting people use their smartphones and reading from a web page, email, PDF, etc.

Music handouts

Don’t use song sheets or books.

Project lyrics on the wall, do songs people already know pretty well, or send an email to everyone with the lyrics of the songs in the body of the email. Everyone will have to pull out their phone during the retreat for this.

You could also create a page on your parish’s website you can direct everyone to that has the lyrics for the songs on it. Everyone will have to pull out their phone during the retreat for this.

Keeping everyone safe at this retreat may require a few additional supplies. This list includes some of the things we mentioned in the above sections, and also a several others:

• Disposable gloves
• Disinfectant wipes and/or spray
• Hand sanitizer
• Extra paper towels