Following the news that Sacred Hearts and St. Stephen Catholic Church, 125 Summit St. in Carroll Gardens, has been blocked by Facebook from livestreaming Masses, Msgr. Guy Massie talked to this paper about the situation.
Although he made the announcement that the church would only be streaming its Masses on their website on Saturday, Jan. 23, Massie still doesn’t know what may have caused the block.
“What I would like to know from Facebook is what we did wrong,” he said. “Is there a policy that we should’ve known or forgotten? I don’t know. It was a surprise to us that we are in ‘Facebook jail.’ I don’t know what exactly happened.”
The church was streaming Sunday Mass at 10 a.m., then morning prayer during the week.
If anything would have caused a block, Massie said the only thing he could think of was that the church might have gone over its allotted time.
“In the last three weeks, we lost three parishioners in a sequence,” he said. “They were very well known in this community. We wanted to stream those funerals because there are so many people that wanted to attend.”
He said the immediate family was larger than the capacity that was allowable in the church, so the church streamed it on the social media site.
“If we overdid this, I’m willing to say okay, that may have been an error. But i don’t know if that’s the situation,” he said. “I don’t think it’s censorship or a conspiracy theory. I’m not one to jump to that conclusion. But I do feel that it may have been a matter of algorithms on Facebook, and maybe that needs to be revisited in the time we are living.”
Facebook hasn’t responded to Msgr. Massie’s questions.
“I would like to be reinstated, but I would also like to know what happened and what we did wrong,” he said.
Former deli owner Helene Bakke dies 
Senior killed by own car