Are we in denial?

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench in the whole world’s plans. We must stop life as we once knew it until scientists find a cure or a vaccine for COVID-19. Otherwise, there is a risk that hundreds of thousands or even millions more, people will die.

May 10, 2020

By Robert Mickens
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench in the whole world’s plans. We must stop life as we once knew it until scientists find a cure or a vaccine for COVID-19. Otherwise, there is a risk that hundreds of thousands or even millions more, people will die.

As of Wednesday May 6, the disease has already killed nearly 265,000 people. The figure is moving towards 74,000 deaths in the United States alone and in Malaysia  107.

World leaders talk about the pandemic as if waging a war against an invisible enemy. Might may make right in an economic and social system rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, but it cannot stop a lethal virus.

You cannot fight it. You cannot go about your normal, everyday lives. If you try, more and more and more people will die.

But it seems that some world leaders and local politicians are willing to move in that very direction.

Even normal folks are finding it hard to grasp the reality of what a pandemic means – that it is everywhere, all over the world.

Millions of people have had to cancel trips to other countries they were scheduled to make during the vacation months.

Some are re-scheduling these foreign travels to a later date, in spite of knowing that almost no airline is taking reservations right now. Still, they are determined to get on with life as if it’s business as usual.

All this, friends, is called denial.

Right now, we cannot continue life as it was before the pandemic. And we probably won’t be able to do so for quite some time. But, even then, it will not be exactly the same.

The coronavirus should be making us all stop. But, instead, it’s “go, go, go”! The world’s modus vivendi is really its modus faciendi.

And where are our Catholic spiritual leaders in all this?

Too many of the Catholic faithful have also responded in the same way – trying to keep everything going as before in the virtual reality of a cyber-church.

Popes and priests have for a very long time, been warning people of the dangers of a consumerist lifestyle, trying to convince them that “being” is much more important than “doing” or “having”.

The forced lockdown should have been the moment for spiritual leaders to stand up and calmly, but firmly, remind their people that this is an opportunity – a summons – to stop “doing”.

Let’s be clear: we cannot really “participate” in a virtual Mass any more than we can share a virtual handshake, hug or kiss. Some things demand real presence. It’s amazing how many Catholic priests and people seem to have forgotten this.

Karl Rahner, who was one of the most important theologians in the initial years following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), had a clear sense of what it would mean to be a believer in the post-confessional age.

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all,” the German Jesuit said.

His point was that Christians in a largely de-Christianised world would have to find their union with God, not in places and things that primitive religion marks out as “sacred”, but in that which it abhors as “mundane”.

Rahner wrote extensively about the incarnate (and incarnational) God and said this God can and must be “experienced” in the living reality all around us.

Rather than mundane, this created reality is infused with transcendence, precisely because of the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus the Christ.

However, some of Rahner’s more progressive-thinking admirers might be surprised that he opposed televising the Mass.--LCI (https://international.la-croix.com/)

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