Coronavirus response requires a solidarity revolution: Food for body and soul

Quotes by Dorothy Day

• "The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"

• "Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul."

Published in The Tablet, a British Jesuit journal, by Christopher White, National Correspondent 
Georgetown Panel: COVID-19 Crisis Shows Need for Solidarity, Community

NEW YORK — Addressing the world two weeks ago at the height of the global pandemic, Pope Francis paid tribute to the “forgotten people” – the grocery clerks, service industry workers, cleaners, and caregivers, the people that are frequently overlooked, yet are now keeping the world functioning.

Earlier this week, a virtual Georgetown University discussion examined how those individuals – and the tens of millions of people experiencing economic devastation from the pandemic – might best be supported by both the Church and the country in the pandemic’s aftermath.

The panel, “Life and Dignity, Justice and Solidarity: Moral Principles for Responding to the COVID-19 Economic Crisis,” was convened on Monday, by the university’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and brought together a mix of policy experts, academics, and a community activist, with the aim of charting a path forward.

E.J. Dionne, who teaches at Georgetown and is a columnist for the Washington Post, kicked off the discussion by noting that while the government is rightfully calling for physical social distancing, he said that now, more than ever, is the time for social connection in order to ensure strong societal bonds to both get through the pandemic and to be united in the eventual rebuilding that will need to occur.

Similarly, New York Times columnist David Brooks highlighted the Catholic principle of solidarity as “an active virtue” that demands the participation of every single individual member of society. While Brooks is not a Catholic, he said that Catholic social teaching is the “most coherent philosophy that opposes a philosophy of rampant individualism” and should be relied on especially now.

The pandemic “exposes the fragmentation in our society,” Brooks continued, and saying that we can’t go back to way things were before.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute rebutted arguments made by some of his fellow conservatives in recent weeks that the cure to the pandemic “cannot be worse than the problem,” by arguing that the economy is meant to be in service of the common good.

While the decision to shutter many businesses in order to encourage social distancing is causing economic hardship, Strain said that economic loss must be tolerated in order to save human lives. Further, he said that there is good historical evidence for workers to be confident that this is not the end of the story and the economy will rebound.

Maru Bautista who works with the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York promoting immigrant-led worker cooperatives said that she hopes that the crisis will lead to a reordering of our current system, including a greater opening to the possibility of Medicare for all to expand access to healthcare.

“We need to have the courage to see new possibilities that can create a different landscape for everybody,” she told the online audience.

Although most of the panelists cautiously praised the recent stimulus bill passed by Congress as a good and necessary first step at providing economic relief, they all agreed it would not be enough to provide long-term support.

Brooks said that he would have liked for a larger percentage of the money to go toward small businesses through the form of forgivable payroll loans rather than forcing businesses to layoff employees so that they can receive unemployment benefits. Bautista said that many immigrants will still have trouble accessing the funding programs, particularly highlighting that food stamps is a critical issue to many people in her community.

Dionne concurred, telling attendees that in Congress it’s hard to pass anything that helps non-citizen immigrants, but noting that if the nation is serious about wanting the economy to take off – and if it is concerned about justice – that must be remedied.

As the panel wrapped up, the discussion moved from economic concerns to communal ones, with Strain noting that even prior to the pandemic, loneliness and isolation was one the rise in America and he feared that this would only exacerbate the problem. He said that we should be particularly concerned about mental health issues, as well as that of heightened domestic abuse, in light of the pandemic.

Brooks said that the individualism that has defined the American system for the past sixty years has “had a good run,” but that he hopes that the nation is now at a turning point toward a great reliance on community.

John Carr, the director of Georgetown’s Initiative, concluded the program, which started at the beginning of Holy Week, but painfully acknowledging that “we’re doing passion and death pretty well, but I hope we can get to resurrection.”

“This is a time to go back to fundamentals,” said Carr, “as sisters and brothers made in the image of God.”
Tags: Catholic Church, Catholic Faith, Coronavirus Pandemic, Georgetown University

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”.