On This Date in Nativity History
22 March 2020
On this date, Nativity celebrated its first live stream Sunday Mass. The celebrant was Father Bob Cilinski, and the other priests concelebrated. The Mass was celebrated at 11:00 am in the school chapel in order to restrict the number of people present. The Mass was streamed via the work phone of Nativity’s Social Media Coordinator, Mary Castellano, who propped the phone on some books she found in the Nativity School teachers lounge. Before this Sunday Mass, the participants did a trial run from the chapel the preceding Friday.
The following is an account of how those first Masses were accomplished, written by Mary Castellano.
“On March 16, 2020, the Diocese of Arlington shut down all public worship to prevent the spread of the novel Coronavirus. I remember Nativity’s Monday Morning Communications Meeting just before the shutdown. When Fr. Bob presented the sad news of the situation, uncertainty hung in the air like a dense fog, and everyone felt it. He looked at everyone in the room and asked, “What are we going to do now…?” At that point I had conducted one successful live stream on Facebook, so naturally I felt confident enough to say, “We’ll live stream it on Facebook!” Trust me when I say that I had no idea what I had just signed myself up for…
“In March and April of 2020, only 10 people were allowed in one room at a time to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. We decided to host the Facebook Live Masses in the School Chapel to limit the number of people who could attend. I set up the live stream using my work phone which was propped up on a tiny 4 inch phone stand on top of a stack of giant textbooks on top of a mobile standing desk (very professional). I pointed the phone at the altar and gently rotated the top-most book to simulate a smooth transition between the altar and the lectern for the Liturgy of the Word (again, very professional). The nice thing about my work phone, a Google Pixel 2 XL, was that it picked up sound very well, but sometimes too well. Just before I hit “GO LIVE” on Facebook, we did an out loud countdown so the others in the room knew when they needed to stop their personal conversations. Imagine Sister Donatella standing in the chapel, socially distanced from everyone else, counting down on her fingers, “3-2-1! Shhh…” And that’s how our Facebook Live Masses began.”
