What Is the Catholic Ethical Response to Extraordinary Times?
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We are living through a moment that will be remembered as a unique health and economic crisis. The question on everyone’s mind is an ethical one: What should I do?
The answer is complicated by uncertainty and inexperience. We have not gone through anything like the pandemic that is steadily affecting the global population.
In the midst of all this, our Catholic moral tradition and history point the way.
A major failing of the post-war world is our ever-expanding list of rights and demands that make us think more about what is due to us and less about what we owe to others. The Catholic Church’s teaching, rooted in the message of Jesus Christ, is all about self-sacrifice and the Beatitudes. “Blessed are they who mourn, / for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4, NABRE). We are called to come forward and be the ones who comfort and transform mourning and sorrow into an opportunity for solidarity and the triumph of compassion.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With this well-known opening line, Charles Dickens points to an interesting paradox in human psychology. Many of our fondest and oft-retold memories involve suffering and crises. Where I grew up on the south Texas Gulf Coast, people recall the hurricanes that brought devastation and they recall the subsequent outpouring of acts of selfless kindness as neighbors helped neighbors.
We are in the midst of a pandemic. It is a crisis that will stretch some institutions past the breaking point depending on our collective responses.
Ironically, the ethical course of action for the vast majority of us is not very flashy. We are called to follow the doctrine of Saint Therese of Lisieux, her “Little Way.” She said that we have to be small and humble and do the smallest things with the greatest love.
Around the world individuals and families are being told to stay home and to take extraordinary precautionary measures to avoid catching or spreading the COVID-19 virus. For upwards of 80% of the currently healthy population, catching this disease will be a mild to moderate experience of sickness. Unfortunately, many—especially, but not only, those who are elderly or immunocompromised—will die in large numbers if they catch it. Although our modern health care interventions can save most people with acute COVID-19 cases, today’s health care infrastructure simply does not have enough ventilators and intensive care unit (ICU) capacity to care for the thousands upon thousands of critically ill persons that will flood in during an uncontrolled pandemic.
The vast majority of us are not personally at risk of death, but we are nonetheless asked to make sacrifices to save others. That is very much in harmony with Catholic ethical thinking. We are called upon to refrain from selfishly hoarding supplies, as I mentioned in an earlier essay titled “Our Better Angels.” One of our greatest challenges will be boredom and frustration at not being able to get out, to do something, to do anything! Many also have to deal with our children suddenly being home from school and our spouses being confined 24/7 under the same roof, and perhaps in cramped quarters. Working from home through these challenges can be no picnic either.
All these trials have a spiritual dimension. It is critical that we increase our prayer life, that we redouble our efforts to achieve greater virtue and sanctity. If attending Mass in person is not possible, the Internet offers us myriad options to participate in a prerecorded or live-streamed Mass. That can be the occasion for a spiritual communion where we ask Christ to come spiritually into our hearts because we cannot receive him physically. Many graces can flow from this practice. Praying together as a family can intensify as well, since we all have the time and a very good reason to do so. The Holy See has made provision for a special Plenary Indulgence for those infected by COVID-19, their caregivers, and those who pray for them.
What should we do? Age-old Catholic wisdom recommends we focus on the essentials, ora et labora (prayer and work). Our prayers will bear fruit. The work most urgently expected of most of us is described best by the Little Flower, Saint Therese: doing our ordinary tasks with extraordinary love.
Copyright © 2020, The National Catholic Bioethics Center, Philadelphia, PA. All rights reserved.
