The Church and the Plague - "A Peste, Fame, et Bello..." (Part one of four)

O God, who willest not the death of the sinner but that he should repent: welcome with pardon Thy people's return to Thee: and so long as they are faithful in Thy service, do Thou in Thy clemency withdraw the scourge of Thy wrath. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son…

(Collect Prayer for the Votive Mass pro tempore mortalitatis)

(Part one of four)

As a consequence of original sin, men are subject to illness and death. It is the fate of all. In past ages, nobody doubted its inevitability, even if most tried to postpone it as much as possible or to ease its sufferings. But even in Christian ages widespread pestilence and mortality sorely tested the faith of men, and many failed the test...

Master of Their Destinies

The contemporary world has convinced itself that men are masters of their destinies; a conviction brought about by centuries of drifting away from God and the consequent Christian understanding of the purpose of man’s life and trials on earth and reinforced by more recent assertions of personal freedom and self-determination. And thus, helped along by man’s increasing mastery of natural forces and in an era of vaccines, sanitation, and efficient medical care, men have grown confident, persuading themselves that illness and death, even if not unavoidable, could be tamed and made at least “acceptable” by suppressing their pains and accompanying anguishes.

But “a society used to thinking it controls everything from climate to gender is poorly equipped to weather the storm of unpredictability that epidemics bring.” (angelusnews.com) Thus when reality – today in the shape of a new, highly contagious virus – obliges us to face our essential powerlessness, our first, instinctive reaction is fear, a fear due to the lack of control brought about by disease and its attendant uncertainties and disruptions of our daily lives.

Fears Manifests Basest Side of Fallen Nature

History is witness that such fears have often prompted many to manifest the basest side of our fallen nature – a selfish avoidance of the sick, the stockpiling of provisions and medications, the seeking out of scapegoats to blame for our sufferings and, more often than not, a mass hysteria that has ended in riotous violence…

For that reason, in her penitential acts, the Church prays: From pestilence, famine, and war, O Lord, deliver us! That is, to be delivered not only from natural catastrophes that are beyond our control but also from the evils of our own doing, all of which bring to the surface what is deep in the hearts of men…

But the Church has also always stressed that God, Who can bring good out of evil, permits these evils as providential means of expiation for our sins, for they become for us the opportunity to acknowledge the error of our ways, and, perhaps, even the beginning of our true conversion, while at the same time furnishing the occasion for the practice of virtues in a heroic degree. The following quote is taken from a Catholic reflection on the spiritual blessings that Providence may derive from the scourge of war, but is also easily applicable to illness and plague:

That there is blessing we have no doubt: such inducements as the urgent putting of our souls in the state of grace if need be; the discharge of some long-neglected duty, such as making a will, paying a debt, forgiving an injury; suffering a salutary reduction of one’s pride of life; being forced to face in a novel, vivid way the four last things; and being so deprived on every side that we are compelled to look to the one thing left to us, the saving of our souls. It may even be that God sends these abrupt blessings for very serious reasons, as when Catholics have grown complacent intellectually and deteriorated morally, and need to be aroused to their true business of salvation by severe awakening. Hora est iam nos de somno surgere…

(The Tablet (London), 1940, August 3, p.98.)

Throughout history, mankind has suffered from innumerable illnesses and often true pandemics, with all their consequent evils and disruptions.

Even into the modern age, the causes of such devastating illnesses were barely known. As a consequence, the modes of transmission were either unknown or could only be guessed at by observation and trial-and-error experiments. These, in turn, led to some tentative remedies and treatments for the sick and to equally tentative precautions for those who cared for them. A few of those remedies and precautions were useful, but most of them were either ineffectual or added new complications, or, unknowingly, even contributed to the further spread of the diseases.

From the very beginning, whatever the circumstances and the limitations of the medical knowledge of the times, as soon as pestilence swept across the lands where she was present, the Church did not hesitate to offer to the sick and the dying her sacrificial service, in imitation of Our Lord: Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (Jn. 15:13.)