The Diocese of San Diego has a policy that children and teachers must wear masks during their faith formation classes. I will not enforce this policy and instead will leave whether to wear a mask up to the parents of our children and individual catechists. My reasoning is summed up in an article published on the University of Southern California website, written by Neeraj Sood, PhD and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD., which states,

“The benefits of masks in preventing serious illness or death from COVID-19 among children are infinitesimally small. At the same time they are disruptive to learning and communicating in classrooms. They may be partially effective in shielding adults from COVID, but since when is it ethical to burden children for the benefit of adults?”

Children are at less risk for serious illness and death from COVID than they are from the flu. For the 2018-2019 flu season, the CDC estimates that 480 children died from the flu. The CDC reports a total of 470 deaths of persons under the age of 18 attributed to COVID as of September 1st, eighteen months since the disease came to our country. There are 68 million persons under the age of 18 in the United States. To help put the risk into perspective, here is a chart created by the New York Times.

David Zweig, writing for the New York Times Magazine Intelligencer, did a deep dive into the studies used by the CDC in support of their guidance on masking schoolchildren and corresponded with numerous experts in pediatrics and epidemiolgy. Below are some excerpts from his article:

The study published by the CDC was both ambitious and groundbreaking. It covered more than 90,000 elementary-school students in 169 Georgia schools from November 16 to December 11 and was, according to the CDC, the first of its kind to compare COVID-19 incidence in schools with certain mitigation measures in place to other schools without those measures. Scientists I spoke with believe that the decision not to include the null effects of a student masking requirement (and distancing, hybrid models, etc.) in the summary amounted to “file drawering” these findings, a term researchers use for the practice of burying studies that don’t produce statistically significant results. “That a masking requirement of students failed to show independent benefit is a finding of consequence and great interest,” says Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “It should have been included in the summary.” “The summary gives the impression that only masking of staff was studied,” says Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist and the senior author of a separate CDC study on COVID-19 transmission in schools, “when in reality there was this additional important detection about a student-masking requirement not having a statistical impact.”

After the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued their student-mask guidance last month, I contacted both organizations asking for the evidence or underlying data upon which they had based their recommendations. The AAP did not respond to multiple requests. The CDC press office replied that since children under 12 cannot be vaccinated, the agency “recommends schools do universal masking” and included links to unrelated materials on vaccines and a recent outbreak among adults. Over the course of several weeks, I also corresponded with many experts — epidemiologists, infectious-disease specialists, an immunologist, pediatricians, and a physician publicly active in matters relating to COVID — asking for the best evidence they were aware of that mask requirements on students were effective. Nobody was able to find a data set as robust as the Georgia results — that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement. (The closest is a study published in Science, based on a Facebook survey, that was suggestive but not conclusive of a marginal benefit of student masking.One doctor, who is on TV regularly and has around 100,000 Twitter followers, sent me two studies where masks were required of all students so there was no way to determine the effect; the authors of one of the studies explicitly noted, “​​we were not able to examine the impact of universal masking owing to nearly 100 percent adoption of this intervention,” and authors of the other study wrote, “it was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask-wearing played in the low rate of disease spread.” )

“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center, told me. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.” She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”

The whole article is worth a read. So what are some of the “downsides” of children wearing masks? Here is an article which weighs the pros and cons. In addition to increased heart rate, fatigue, deeper and more frequent breathing, the author focuses on how masks impair communication and block emotional signaling. The human face is expressive and contributes greatly to what is communicated between two people. Children are learning the connection between words spoken, tone of voice, facial expression, and other body language. To deprive them of the fullness of human communication is, in my view, a substantial harm.

What will be the long term damage done to our children from years of mask wearing? Only God knows. It may end up being substantial and irreparable. It seems to me that public policy makers are not sufficiently weighing this.

Since the pandemic, I have had tens of thousands of interactions with several thousand different people, some as brief as a greeting after Mass, others, hour-long sessions of pastoral counseling. Often times people have come into my office wearing a mask, and I let them know that they don’t have wear it if they don’t want to. Speaking with people and seeing their faces, I notice a significant and immediate positive difference in our ability to connect and communicate. It is hard for me to understand why this isn’t obvious to everyone.

I conclude with a short reflection on the theological significance of the face. In the third chapter of his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul discusses how after Moses spent time with the Lord, he had to wear a veil over his face because it glowed with a divine radiance and people were afraid to see it. In the New Covenant, we can look upon the glory of God with unveiled faces. While this shouldn’t be used as a proof text to say that wearing a mask is a sin, it is worth pondering. “Therefore, since we have such hope, we act very boldly and not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites could not look intently at the cessation of what was fading.” (2 Cor. 3:12-13) “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18).” When we behold the face of Christ, we are able to see the glory of God. But also, the face of the human person, who is made and redeemed in the image of God, is a reflection of that divine glory.