Lack of coronavirus pandemic solidarity is unethical - call fora universal faith response

Echo opinion- "The United States is now paying the price for decades of defunding government..."

Maine Writer opinion- The most evidence I have ever witnessed to the pervasive example of how evil is infiltrating the response to a world wide threat to the human condition.  This opinion essay was published in the British Jesuit magazine, The Tablet.

Opinion: There is no more dramatic image from the coronavirus pandemic than that of the solitary figure of Pope Francis standing in the pouring rain as twilight darkened the sky, addressing an empty, cold and desolate St Peter’s Square. He delivered a meditation on one of the more perplexing passages of the New Testament, when a storm threatens the boat in which Jesus and his disciples had embarked. They called on him to save them from drowning, saying: “Do you not care if we perish?” The papal sermon, accompanied by the blessing Urbi et Orbi, which is usually reserved for Christmas and Easter, was broadcast worldwide and is still available online. It has brought comfort and encouragement to many millions.

Francis does not have a tidy answer to the disciples’ question. Jesus rebuked their lack of faith, but he did not let them drown. God does care. In his address Francis criticises the pettiness and shallowness of the values of the world, and the failures to show solidarity, which the pandemic has exposed. The virus is, as it were, revealing humanity to itself.
The calls on God to save the human race from a mess of its own and then blaming God for not doing so are in contrast to those wonderful manifestations of solidarity with which the world is becoming familiar. “We were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick. Now that we are in a stormy sea, we implore you: ‘Wake up, Lord!’”

So it is a time to “separate what is necessary from what is not … We can look to so many exemplary companions for the journey, who, even though fearful, have reacted by giving their lives. 

This is the force of the Spirit poured out and fashioned in courageous and generous self-denial. It is the life in the Spirit that can redeem, value and demonstrate how our lives are woven together and sustained by ordinary people – often forgotten people – who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines nor on the grand catwalks of the latest show, but who without any doubt are in these very days writing the decisive events of our time: doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, cleaners, caregivers, providers of transport, law and order forces, volunteers, priests, religious men and women …”

The “forgotten people” who are “writing the decisive events of our time” reveal humanity to itself in a different way. The archetypal figure of this revelation is not the banker but the doctor or the nurse – one whose creed is not greed, but dedicated and sometimes perilous service. One woman, asked why she was going into hospital to start her shift, replied simply: “Because I’m a nurse. It’s who I am.” This is a lesson in the meaning of vocation, a commitment to the common good, come what may. A self-obsessed society needs such lessons. Those called may not know that it is God who is doing the calling, but they realise it is something that transcends their own interests.

The dysfunction of human society as it wrestles with the pandemic is a particular rebuke to Western societies satisfied with themselves as progressive and advanced. Their economic and political systems have let them down at a time of severe crisis. The state-of-the-art Titanic has struck an iceberg again, shattering all pretensions as to its unsinkability. Through culpable complacency driven by hubris, Britain and the United States failed to organise enough masks and protective clothing, enough ventilators and testing kits, indeed enough hospital beds, to cope with an increasingly obvious and visible threat. Many lives have been lost as a result; many health workers have still not been given the protection they need and deserve, and have themselves fallen sick.

The Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria called the sheer inability of the American public health system to cope with the coronavirus “the new face of American exceptionalism”. But it is too easy just to blame Donald Trump, he wrote. “The United States is paying the price today for decades of defunding government … and demeaning and disparaging government workers.” It is no less true of Britain. Boris Johnson has finally publicly contradicted the key idea of the state-shrinking individualism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, that “there is no such thing as society”. Looking at the way communities all over Britain are responding to the epidemic, he declared, with apparent surprise: “There really is such a thing as society.” The government appealed for 250,000 volunteers to help the National Health Service; almost immediately, three times as many answered the call. 

Angels of Mercy - Retired doctors and nurses have flocked to return to duty during the pandemic

Retired doctors and nurses have flocked to return to duty in this emergency, despite the risks to themselves. The National Health Service (NHS) has been described as the nearest thing the British have to a national religion; given these demonstrations of profound solidarity, it is not so much a substitute for religion, as an expression of it.

The lockdown is having a major effect on people’s ordinary day-to-day living. Everyone is rediscovering how interdependent life really is, how much we owe to public services, how often we lean on our colleagues and neighbours, how precious are our family and friends. But there may be a price to be paid for the way Church leaders have acquiesced in the designation of church (and synagogue, mosque and temple) attendance as “non-essential”. 

For it is from churches, synagogues, mosques and temples that society ultimately draws its fundamental values. Without them, solidarity itself would eventually wither away, and there would be nothing to resist a philosophy of “every man for himself”– of which the terrifying corollary is, of course, “and the devil take the hindmost”.