VATICAN (CNS): The great mission and message of the Church, “We are there for you if you are ill, if you feel afraid, if you feel lonely, was often not heard,” throughout the Covid-19 pandemic said a moral theologian, Sigrid Müller. She and fellow theologian, M. Therese Lysaught, noted that due to mandates and restrictions aimed at safeguarding people’s lives and health, safeguarding religious freedom often became a major issue that obscured or neglected to highlight the core of the Church’s mission.
“Too much focus—sometimes the only focus!—was laid on participation in the Eucharist, on the question of whether Mass can be held or not and under which regulation,” Müller, head of the institute for systematic theology and ethics at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna, noted.
“This created the impression that the Church is but another congregation of people [like a sports club] which needs to be regulated because of the gathering of people,” she said.
“The Church is there for times of trouble” with its members working in hospitals, helping the elderly, reaching out to families and more, she said.
It is important people understand the parish as “a community of life and not only as a community of prayer,” which can be hard to see in countries that have strong support systems and do not rely so much on the Church for social services, Müller said.
She said the Church community is meant to offer help, and the big questions that were often unasked were: “Who needs care because he/she is lonely? Who needs someone to talk to because he/she is afraid? Who needs support because work and home schooling go beyond one’s strength and personal resources? Which support networks can we create as members of a parish?”
Lysaught, a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said the real risks facing the Church and practicing its faith “come from our own failure to be a Church comprised of the sort of missionary disciples described in Evangelii Gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel], Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation.” In it, the pope called for a new order of priorities in ministry in which the Church moves from an attitude of self-preservation to looking outward with mission-oriented evangelisation.
‘Christianity was born out of 300 years of actual oppression by the Roman Empire. If our religious practice could be imperilled by public health measures that are applied evenly to all organisations for the sake of the public good, then the problem is with our religious practice’
M. Therese Lysaught
“I think the biggest danger lies internally—from those who are using the pandemic as a pretext to continue to reject Pope Francis’ powerful theological vision that prioritises unity, the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, and a message of mercy, charity and justice, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable in the world,” said Lysaught, who teaches at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership of the Stritch School of Medicine at Loyola University in Chicago.
“Christianity was born out of 300 years of actual oppression by the Roman Empire. If our religious practice could be imperilled by public health measures that are applied evenly to all organisations for the sake of the public good, then the problem is with our religious practice,” she added.
Müller said Catholic teachings can help people navigate the uncertainties and choices to be made during the pandemic.
She said that those who put off vaccination because they feel Covid-19 does not pose a big enough risk for them must ask whether they can avoid putting the people around them at risk.
She noted, for example, that some people think depending on the body’s immune system “is more natural” than vaccination. “As Catholics we ought to keep in mind that normally both natural and traditional [classical] medicine can be applied in order to heal, if they are effective and good for the patient,” she said.
She said that those who put off vaccination because they feel Covid-19 does not pose a big enough risk for them must ask whether they can avoid putting the people around them at risk.
“The main question is whether we are ready to love the other as much as ourselves, which would lead to searching for a right balance” and to think of those who cannot be vaccinated and “therefore depend on the others’ help to minimise the risk of infection,” she said.
Lysaught said discernment and forming one’s conscience to make moral decisions require “taking seriously the position of the pope, various other authoritative magisterial bodies and documents, the scientific evidence which changes as we learn more about this virus and as the pandemic continues to unfold, and always being oriented toward the charitable care of others.”
Referencing the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, she said, “The centre of Catholic moral analysis is the virtue of charity—the virtue of self-gift or self-emptying love for the good of others,” because this is who Catholics understand God to be.
Who God is and how he acts, “this is how Catholics are called to live and act in the world,” Lysaught added.
Charitable care, “which is another word for love, overcomes fear,” she said, and a lot of Catholics have been a great witness during the pandemic.
Catholic health care workers have “stood valiantly on the front lines,” working under “truly traumatic conditions to care for wave upon wave upon wave of desperately sick people, holding the hands of their patients as they died because families couldn’t be there. And now it’s starting all over again. I don’t know how much more they can take,” she said.
So many bishops around the world have been giving “sound theological arguments in favour of public health measures, creatively developed new ways for Catholics to worship together and continue their ministries … rolled up their sleeves and witnessed the importance of being vaccinated, opened churches as vaccination sites, and have vocally and visibly cooperated for the common good,” Lysaught said.
Noting that approximately 80 per cent of Catholics in the United States had been vaccinated as of the end of July, according to a report by Public Religion Research Institute, she said that they should be applauded.
She said Catholics and their leaders need to “now turn their attention to what we have learned from this pandemic and how we can, as a Church, do better going forward in living the authentic call and mission of being Catholic—the works of mercy, accompanying the elderly, attending to the lonely, caring for our brothers and sisters across the globe—emptying ourselves as Christ did.”
