David Quinn
How should the Catholic Church respond when a pandemic breaks out? What is the correct pastoral response? What kind of pastoral response best fits with medical best practice? Are priests generally good at a time like this? What should we as individual Christians do?
It’s hard to know at this stage whether ordinary people have an exaggerated fear of the coronavirus, properly called Covid-19, or not. In their own minds do they have an over-heightened fear about the number who will die?
To judge from the international experience so far, the risk is greatest to the very elderly and those who already have a serious illness. According to Chinese figures, it is fatal in about 14% of cases where the person who has caught it is 80 or more, but when a person is this elderly, they may have other underlying conditions anyway. A healthy 80-year-old would have a bigger chance of shaking off the virus.
The younger the person, the better the chance they will shrug it off, possibly with few if any symptoms. It will very rarely be fatal.
Most Massgoers are obviously on the older side and so will be more at risk if there is an outbreak of the virus. But even if that happens, we should be careful not to give into exaggerated fears. Every year, there is an outbreak of flu, but we do not stop going to Mass for that reason, even though older people are more at risk and worldwide the flu is estimated to kill between 300,000 and 600,000 annually. That is vastly in excess of the numbers who have so far died of Covid-19, although it is still very hard to know how all this is going to develop.
As at mid-January, 44 Irish people had died from ordinary, seasonal flu – almost all aged 65 and over – and more than 2,700 were diagnosed with it. Again, we do not stop going to Mass for this reason.
The Churches have issued guidelines on how to minimise the risk of contracting anything. For example, we should not shake hands for the Sign of Peace but simply nod to each other instead. Many parishes do that anyway during the winter months.
Ministers of Eucharist have to make sure they properly disinfect their hands before distributing Communion.
These are simply common-sense precautions.
The HSE has issued advice to the Churches. This includes telling people who have the virus and have self-isolated at home not to expect priests to visit them as that would only expose the priests themselves to it and then they would then infect others.
If a person is self-isolating at home, that will, in any case, mean their case is not serious enough to warrant hospitalisation. In fact, medical experts estimate that just 1-4% of those who contract the virus would require hospital treatment.
However, priests will continue to visit seriously ill people in hospital, taking the precautions they take now when visiting highly infectious patients.
Quarantined
As we know, limited parts of northern Italy are in lockdown, that is, they have been quarantined and people are being told to stay at home, not travel and not congregate anywhere including churches.
What are priests doing in those parts of Italy? They are keeping in touch with ill or worried parishioners by phone or Skype or email. Only a tiny minority of parishioners in the affected parts of Italy have the virus.
Francis Rocca, Rome correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, reports that priests are using modern forms of communications to raise the spirits of worried people and to encourage a religious perspective on the outbreak. One priest commented: “The contagion of the virus is leading to a contagion of prayer.”
In its long history, the Catholic Church has obviously seen vastly worse outbreaks of disease than this one. Until very recently, in fact, humans had to live in nearly constant fear of outbreaks of TB, or cholera, or typhoid which could often be deadly. Smallpox was particularly virulent and a huge killer.
Then, of course, there was the Black Death, which struck Europe in the 1340s wiping out about a third of the populations of the countries it swept through, including Ireland. This is very hard for us to fathom. If we measure these things on an earthquake-style Richter scale, then the Black Death (a version of bubonic plague, it appears), registers a 9.0, but even if Covid-19 gets very bad, it will be more like a 0.9.
There are records of how priests behaved during the Black Death, and it appears they did so very well. They ministered to the sick and dying to such an extent that their death rate was even higher than that of the general population. It is estimated that about 45% of all priests were killed in the infected regions, mostly the best and the bravest.
Indeed, priests and religious have historically been incredibly courageous at times like this, including during the regular outbreaks of deadly diseases in Ireland until the development of antibiotics and vaccinations only a few decades ago.
As for ordinary Christians, well, we have to keep an eye out for our neighbours as well if the Government introduces containment policies.
We can’t leave it all to the clergy.
Indeed, in the quarantined northern Italian town of Codogo, with its 15,000 inhabitants, a dozen volunteers for the church’s charitable arm, Caritas, continue to bring food to the poor and disabled there.
Because that is what Christians do at these times, and at all times.