Believing Attitude to The Covid19 Pandemic

 The front pages of all the media on the planet have been practically monopolized by the Covid19 pandemic. Without being as harmful a virus as SARS, MERS or swine flu (pandemics of our century), Covid19 has spread much more easily and rapidly, posing today one of the most formidable health threats. Undoubtedly, the extraordinary increase in international travel, as a result of globalization, has contributed crucially to this expansion.

It is worth remembering that this pandemic, regardless of its origin, has neither been the first nor will it be the last. To remember only the most lethal since the beginning of our era, we can cite the plague of Justinian (541-542) that ended the lives of more than 30 million people in just one year. The Black Death (1347-1351) took away more than 200 people (a third of the population in Europe at that time); smallpox (1520) took the lives of 56 million people; closer to us we have the American flu imported into Europe (1918-1919) which wiped out 20 million people, and finally AIDS (1981- ) which has killed between 25 and 35 million people.

It is worth remembering the history of pandemics to avoid the presumption of believing that they are new catastrophes. Certainly, no pandemic is similar to another; in this sense we can say that what is happening to us is something "new". For example, one of the novelties of Covid19 is the rapidity of its expansion, the result of the great interconnectivity of humanity, as well as the media magnitude it has had or the incredible impact on the world economy, managing to paralyze for the first time in history, and at the same time, the largest economies on the planet. As some experts say, the economy is now in uncharted territory.

Even so, these unique characteristics, typical of the globalization achieved in the XXI century, should not overshadow the reality of a common denominator that helps us to interpret each pandemic from its fundamental keys. While the tools with which we must deal with this pandemic should not be the same as those of our ancestors, it would be foolish to discard the wisdom acquired by humanity throughout its turbulent history. To give an example, there we have the ancient technique of confinement or separation between healthy and sick as the best solution to stop an uncontrolled infection.

Believing and Reading the Virus

Unfortunately, we believers have not always been bold enough to face the evils that come from a nature in constant creative process; we have not even been to interpret natural disasters within the divine design in a constructive way. In this way, we must recognize that religion has sometimes understood pandemics as plagues of divine origin, either to annihilate enemies (as in Egypt) or to punish believers themselves for their sins (such as banishment). The tremendous insecurity that produces the human being not understanding neither the meaning nor and the origin of the tragedies seems to have made it necessary to look for "culprits", whether It is God in his inscrutable designs or the human race in his sinful condition.

It is evident that there are fundamental theological experiences related to concepts such as "divine punishment" or the "wrath of God", although making a literal reading of them, ignoring the historical, psychological and even mystical contexts, can make us fall into many traps from which we will know a lot to get out. The simplicity of attributing to God any event that overflows our intellectual and even spiritual knowledge can constitute a serious transgression of the second commandment, shamelessly taking the name of God in vain to justify not only our rational limits, but even our intellectual and spiritual laziness.

Believing attitude to the Virus      

Reality is making us smaller and smaller in number, but that does not mean that it has to make us weaker. On the contrary, in nature this process of dwarfing has its advantages by increasing what is now called "resilience". An elephant or lion may be stronger than mice or ants, but it is elephants and lions that are in danger of extinction, not mice or ants. A smaller Church can also be more flexible and resilient when its size shrinks at the same time as its ties become closer. Therefore, this is an ideal time to recover some essential values of faith, especially those that reinforce the community as an antidote to individualism. If individualism makes the subject great in order to differentiate him from the community, Christian personalize advocates a relational humility that not only dignifies the individual by turning him into a person, but also reinforces the resilience of the groups whose members live in communion.

The stress to which we are subjecting the planet forces us to a more ecological model of Church, where relations with nature, with others and with God are imposed by their quality. Digitalization is going to test the quality of our relationships. If new technologies cease to be a means and become an end, there is a fear that far from strengthening us as individuals and groups they will make us more fragile, immature and dependent. It is essential to value a natural relational sense, where the artificial is a means and never an end in itself. The domestic church must take center stage and with it the pastoral promotion of family relations. I am thinking, for example, of the need to recover child catechesis as a family, freeing parishes from a structure that is too collegial to become oases of spirituality again in an increasingly desert world. The treatment of the sick and elderly in hospitals and nursing homes must be a priority, prolonging the healing of Jesus of Nazareth. It goes without saying that given the economic crisis that is looming, social service from charity must be the backbone of our parishes, even if this means the loss of economic power of the clergy who, although already low, enjoy social security within the reach of many few people.

In conclusion, it is about taking another step in the process of pastoral conversion that is based on a spiritual renewal, taking advantage of the plagues to get out of our addictions and enter freely into the deserts of life, because the hardness of the desert also frees us from the accessory, purifies and strengthens us in the essentials.