Mary Kenny
My inclinations are to regard the hullaballoo about the coronavirus – Covid19 – with a pinch of salt. Yes, it’s upsetting that more than 3,000 people world-wide have died from the epidemic: but (at the time of writing) that’s out of 90,933 who have caught it. To put it in perspective, the World Health Organisation estimates that, globally, up to half a million people die each year from ordinary influenza.
Yet what is beginning to be alarming about Covid-19 is its contagious effect, and the way it is already changing our way of life – and maybe, in consequence, attitudes. We’re being advised to practice ‘social distance’ from one another, because a handshake transmits countless numbers of germs and bacteria.
The social kiss – once obligatory among the ‘ladies who lunch’ – has declared verboten. Although, so far, I seem to be reasonably healthy, I’ve already been greeted by friends with a wave in the air and shrieks of “Hi – no kissing! No handshakes!”
We are told to avoid gatherings – don’t get into clusters with other people. Wash your hands possibly 20 times a day while singing Happy Birthday twice. (That’s the length of time you should spend on each hand-washing.) Somewhat OCD?
New protocols are being put in place for government and business. Is that face-to-face encounter really necessary? Can’t you do it all by video-conferencing? As Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiating team meet the EU’s negotiating squad, they have been instructed to sit far apart from one another and to avoid any personal touching. Not a very good augury for furthering mutual understanding: in all such encounters, much may depend upon the personal touch.
The word ‘self-isolate’ is being increasingly used. The hermit, the monk and the enclosed nun once followed a vocation: now their lifestyle is upheld as a model of health and safety.
Sensible
It’s sensible to avoid catching or transmitting a virus. But in this battle plan to combat any possible pandemic, it looks as though two elements of our lives will diminish or disappear: the personal, human touch, and the gregarious contact with others which is fundamental to community. That seems to me almost as discouraging as the pesky virus itself.
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Read it and weep
My mother-in-law used to say “the book you get rid of today is the one you need tomorrow” – perhaps a metaphor for many things which we miss when they’re gone. I had to give away a shoal of books when I was de-camping from my old Dublin flat in 2017, and often, indeed, I miss one of them.
Some turn out to be quite valuable. I’ve been looking for a copy of John Healy’s slim memoir about growing up in Mayo, Nineteen Acres, for which I once paid around a tenner. Now, Amazon UK can offer me a ‘collectible’ version ‘from’ £125 (€143.50), a new copy for £141.95 (€162.96) and a used edition in good condition for £52.50 (€60.27). It’s a very fine, short book about the poverty of small Irish farms in the 1930s, and now, it seems, such memoirs are a goldmine.
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The ‘burning desire’ of Pius XII
It will take months, perhaps years, for historians to trawl through the Vatican archives examining the papers relating to Pope Pius XII [pictured] during World War II which have now been opened. It has been alleged since the 1960s that Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, didn’t take sufficient measures to halt the genocide of the Jews.
As is often the case, it was a drama, The Deputy, written by the German Rolf Hochhuth in 1963, which first prompted this accusation. What we do know, already, is that after returning from Hitler’s Germany, where he was the Vatican legate during the 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli helped his predecessor Pius XI write a stinging encyclical denouncing Nazism (and racism), and pointedly written in German, not Latin: Mit brennender sorge (With burning concern).
It was distributed in Germany, often secretly, by the Catholic church. It enraged Hitler. The world should have paid more attention to it.