OXFORD (CNS): Catholic dioceses and religious congregations across Europe are offering to turn Church facilities into spaces needed for health care or housing during the Covid-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.
Church leaders throughout Europe have been struggling to maintain Catholic religious devotions during enforced national lockdowns against the coronavirus, but have also sought ways, in addition to regular aid from Caritas and other Catholic organisations, of making resources available for health and social services.
The Italian Bishops’ Conference has been posting and updating daily, a list of actions and activities carried out by diocesan Caritas organisations.
The Diocese of Crema, in Italy’s devastated Lombardy region, said on March 28 that it was preparing to host “35 Chinese doctors who will come to assist at the Crema hospital and a field hospital that will be built over the next five or six days” on the grounds of a former convent now owned by the diocese.
The diocese also has offered “25 places for health workers who cannot return to their families after work so as to not place their relatives at risk.”
The Diocese of Bergamo, also in Lombardy, set aside 50 single rooms with bathrooms in the diocesan seminary for doctors and nurses coming to help from outside the region.
Crema and Bergamo are just two of the 23 dioceses that have informed the national civil protection service that they can provide accommodation for up to 500 medical personnel.
Another 18 Italian dioceses have made more than 300 beds in 25 seminaries, convents, retreat houses or clinics available to the government for people who are in quarantine or recently released from the hospital, it said. Twenty-one dioceses, the bishops’ statement said, have expanded the number of beds available for the homeless as well as expanding their normal operating times to 24 hours a day.
In Ukraine, Father Lubomyr Javorski, finance officer of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, acknowledged the pastoral role of chaplains, but said, “The Church also has many property resources which can be used during the pandemic. These facilities can be converted into hospitals, but also made available to physicians far from their workplaces and to people returning from abroad with nowhere to spend their quarantine.”
Bishop Mario Iceta Gavicagogeascoa of Bilbao, Spain, said he, like other bishops, had been forced to close local churches, but was now preparing some for pandemic victims.
“We’ve responded to the appeal of civil authorities by making facilities and buildings available,” Bishop Iceta told the Religion-Digital news agency on March 25.
“The conversion of a religious congregation building here is already underway, and the authorities are studying how to prepare other diocesan properties,” he said.
Bishop Iceta told Religion-Digital he was ready to resume his previous career as a doctor, if Pope Francis consented.
“The Church, as Pope Francis says, is a field hospital—isn’t this a favourable occasion to deploy the services of this hospital?” asked the 55-year-old bishop, who trained as a surgeon before his ordination and sits on Bilbao’s Academy of Medical Sciences.
“I haven’t practiced medicine for a long time and would need to catch up on current advances. But if it were necessary and there was no better solution, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would offer to resume,” he said.
In Italy, television channels showed San Giuseppe Church at Seriate being used as a depository for coffins, which were later gathered by military trucks for cremation as local authorities struggled with the scale of deaths.
In Germany, one southern diocese said it had opened a telephone hotline for needs ranging from shopping to childcare, while Benedictine nuns in Bavaria said on March 26 they were manufacturing 100 reusable respiratory masks daily for local hospitals.
In Portugal, dioceses offered seminary rooms and other facilities to health professionals and civil protection teams.
The Ecclesia news agency reported on March 26 that the Diocese of Guarda in Portugal, had turned over its apostolic centre for “emergency care,” while the Jesuit order’s Oficina technical college in Lisbon said it was producing visors with 3D technology for local medical centres.
“The manufacture of visors immediately aroused interest from other sectors, such as firefighters, municipality officials and security forces,” the school’s director, Miguel Sa Carneiro, told Ecclesia.
“Former students whose companies have this equipment are making it available and we’re creating a network of partnerships to will allow increased production,” he said.
