In late February, countless Christians pledged to give up vices like alcohol, chocolate and Netflix for the duration of Lent.

What they didn’t know was that in the coming weeks they’d also be giving up social gatherings, concerts, televised sports, eating in restaurants and virtually every other aspect of ordinary life.

As the novel coronavirus has given new meaning to a season of self-sacrifice, some faith leaders are granting worshipers a pass from traditional Lenten rituals. On Thursday, Bishop James Checchio, whose diocese in New Jersey includes about 600,000 Catholics, announced that he was waiving the requirement to abstain from eating meat on Fridays. Both the food shortages in grocery stores and the fact that people were already sacrificing so much had factored into his decision, he wrote, adding that meat was still off-limits for Good Friday.

Catholic dioceses from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh to Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, have issued similar decrees over the past week. In Louisiana, Bishop Shelton Fabre wrote that the coronavirus “has placed most, if not all, of our faithful in a situation wherein obtaining food, including meal alternatives from meat, the rising cost of fish and other forms of seafood, and even the challenge of being able to obtain groceries without endangering their health, make it clearly difficult for them to fulfill this practice.”

Those who choose to eat meat on the remaining Fridays of Lent should do works of charity and piety instead, he suggested.

The unusual dispensations underscored how the global pandemic has upended religious traditions. As Lent has progressed, churches have rapidly gone from pondering more sanitary ways to give Communion to closing their doors altogether. In late February, many clergy worried about administering ashes to worshipers’ foreheads, but opted to vigorously sanitize their hands instead of forgoing the custom entirely, The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey reported. A mere two weeks later, most had canceled services and Mass.

“Had not planned on giving quite this much for Lent,” read a sign posted outside a church in Providence, Rhode Island last week.

Others have made variations on the same joke – “When they told us to give up something for lent I didn’t know we had to give up everything,” read one Thursday tweet – or admitted to giving up on their Lenten vows entirely. Humor aside, though, many religious leaders say that the directives imposed by public health officials are actually fitting for a season of suffering and abstention.

Giving up in-person church services in favor of worshiping at home is “like the ultimate Lent,” the Rev. Chris Arnold, the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said to Episcopal News Service. “What greater fast is there than a fast from the Eucharist?”

Some see a parallel between the isolation of quarantine and Jesus’s 40 days alone in the wilderness. Sheltering in place can be “our opportunity to be in the desert like Jesus, with time away in solitary prayer,” Father Paul Keller of St. Paul Catholic Newman Center in Fresno, Calif., told Catholic News Service. That kind of self-denial and reflection “couldn’t be more Lenten,” he added.

Church leaders have noted that fasting for Lent can also be a way of saving food for a future time of need, and called on their congregants to perform acts of charity by helping out vulnerable neighbors. And those who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands can take the opportunity to study spiritual texts.

“At minimum, we now have extra time to spend in prayer each day,” wrote Bishop Frank Caggiano of the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. “We may never again have a Lenten season that affords us so much time to give to the Lord.”

But it’s looking quite likely that Lent will end before the global pandemic does. Easter, which is a little over two weeks away, could be devoid of egg hunts, large family gatherings and packed church services this year.

“I think, if anything, there’s an opportunity in this,” the Rev. Scott Gunn, an Episcopal priest in Cincinnati, told Episcopal News Service. “When you pare away all of the trappings and also all of the traditions and customs, maybe we’re going to have no choice but to focus on what’s really important about the celebration of Holy Week.”