CARTHAGE, Mo. — One of North America’s largest religious pilgrimages usually brings tens of thousands of people to Carthage the first weekend of August of each year, but for the second year in a row, that event has been cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Fathers at the Congregation of the Mother of the Redeemer, located at Fairview and Grand in Carthage, announced last week that the 2021 Marian Days celebration will be cancelled.
The 2020 celebration was also cancelled for the same reason — fears of spreading COVID-19.
Father John Paul Tai Tran, provincial minister of the Congregation, said the fathers and brothers didn’t have enough people to ensure the level of sanitation across the entire event to ensure that pilgrims and the Carthage community would be safe when thousands of people gathered in what has traditionally become a tent city in the neighborhoods surrounding the Congregation grounds.
Tran said the Fathers made the decision after meeting with city officials and Jasper County Health Department Director Tony Moehr.
“Based on what we know and what they know, both sides agreed that we shouldn’t have Marian Days this year,” Tran said. “We base our decision on the CDC guidelines and also on what’s happening here and we were just unclear what’s going to happen in August and that’s why we made this decision. Even if it’s ok to gather, we don’t have enough people and we’re not ready to provide people with the sanitation stations they need. Even all the restaurants that come in, I don’t think they can be ready because people are packed into small areas there so it’s not safe”
Carthage Police Chief Greg Dagnan said the Fathers had pretty much made up their minds before the meeting that holding Marian Days was still too dangerous.
“The Fathers obviously want to do the right thing and follow CDC guidelines and make sure everyone is safe,” Dagnan said. “What they stressed probably more than anything else was they want their parishioners to be safe. If you come to Marian Days, they want people to know they’re safe in coming and right now we’re just not at that level of vaccination. We’re not at the level where we can have 50,000 or 60,000 people stand shoulder to shoulder and camp together for a week.”
The Fathers said they wanted to make an announcement by the middle of May to make sure pilgrims and the vendors who come and set up restaurants and a makeshift shopping mall to serve the crowd can change their plans accordingly.
Tran said fathers at the Congregation worried that they would not be able to provide enough sanitation stations or keep places like communal restrooms sanitized enough to prevent spread of the virus if even one infected person attended the event.
“The CDC has said we can gather in big groups again, but a big group is like 250 people or something like that, not 60,000 people like we get,” Tran said. “Even if we based our rules on those made for all the big sports facilities, a sporting event is only one day for a few hours and they have to check all the people that come in. People have to be vaccinated and they have people to check their temperature and wear a mask and I don’t think we have the personnel to do that at Marian Days. We have people camping and gathering here for five or six days for Marian Days.”
Plans for 2022
Dagnan said not having the event for two years in a row could make for unique challenges for the hundreds of law enforcement officers who come in to help the Carthage Police Department provide security for the Marian Days pilgrims.
Marian Days was held every year from 1978 to 2019 and the event grew from a few hundred people to estimates of over 100,000 people attending in some past years.
In more recent years, the Carthage Police Department has worked closely with the Fathers to maintain security at the event, calling in officers from communities across Southwest Missouri to help.
The Father reimbursed the city for a significant portion of the costs to pay the officers and pay for some equipment.
Dagnan said when the event happened every year consistently, he could count on having several officers who had been to Marian Days in the past coming to help and show new officers who may not know what to expect the ropes.
“One of the things we talk about at the police department and I think it would apply to all city workers, we’ve onboarded new people who have never experienced a Marian Days,” Dagnan said. “So they’re not going to get one their first summer like all new people do, now they’re not going to get one their second summer. I think there’s maybe a training element there that we didn’t really have before. If you have a new person, they figure it out. I think that’s going to be a little different.”
Tran said the fathers and brothers at the Congregation are saddened to have to cancel the event a second year, but the safety of the pilgrims and of residents of Carthage is top priority.
“We all miss it of course, but we know that people’s health and life are more important,” Tran said. “This is one of our main missionary works we have in our community and it’s hard not to have it. We put it on for more than 40 years and now two years not doing it is tough. I hope that by 2022 we’ll be back to normal. If things are going like this and a lot of people are vaccinated, I think a lot of people will come back in 2022. A lot of people are still asking us if we’re having it or not, so I think they will come back.”
