As citizens concerned about “flattening the curve” of the impact of the Corona virus, especially for our most vulnerable populations, here in my Maryland Focolare community house we are hunkered down indoors, pretty much emerging only for essential groceries and a socially distanced walk in the neighborhood.
As we stayed home yesterday (Sunday), what to make of the cessation of public liturgies? I realize there has been some discussion in the religious press about whether this is a sign of solidarity or of cowardly capitulation. Personally, I see it as an unambiguous sign of wise, prudent, loving solidarity.
Perhaps because of our community’s international reach, the news of the tragic proportion of the crisis, especially in Italy and other countries, often arrives with a very individual human face: the illness or death of someone we know, or of their relatives, of a community leader in a specific city, and yesterday the news that in one Italian town a whole convent of 40 religious sisters is infected.
With this awareness, I have received the national and local public health recommendations with tremendous sense of gravity. As a Catholic who in normal times is a daily mass goer, this past week I have found great solace by participating in a recording of the daily mass celebrated by Pope Francis. I have been wonderfully nourished by his essential homilies, petitions that embrace the wide range of suffering on our planet, and the profound invitation to reverent “spiritual communion.”
When the Holy Father pauses at length before the Blessed Sacrament at the end of the liturgy, I of course realize that there is a tremendous difference between physical presence in church and my interaction with a recording on a screen.
But in these circumstances, I also sense that this enormous gap can be filled with love: the love that emerges from being united with our local Archbishop, who issued the guidelines to not publicly gather; love for those who are most vulnerable to the virus, especially those who are elderly or with fragile health; and of course a very concrete love for our medical workers, with the awareness of how reductions in public gatherings can contribute to keeping them from getting overwhelmed… and so on.
We are One Body, the Body of Christ – and we are experiencing that reality in a way that I never imagined we could.
So what is mine to do in these circumstances? First, I feel a very deep invitation to prayer. Struggling with insomnia as I worry about the people in my life who are vulnerable, I have been pasting tiny post-its with their names on a large picture of “Mary Untier of Knots,” and I feel that with this Our Lady herself is helping me to let her hold those fears in her loving hands. Second, I try to reach out (via email, zoom or phone) to at least two people per day (beyond those in my community house), to simply check in, listen, and participate in whatever they are going through, to again bring all of those concerns to prayer.
Finally, leaning on these two walking sticks, I have sensed over the past week that these practices nourish the insight that I need to be thoughtful in my approach to accompanying my students as we proceed with a virtual teaching platform. I intuit that they may need different things at different times: some need continuity in the projects that they have undertaken, others need flexibility, and others are in dire need of a listening ear. And perhaps most fruitful, these practices also help me to admit that I too feel vulnerable, and greatly in need of a sense of connection and community. Amy Uelmen
The International Law and Religion Moot Court is a competition organized by the Brazilian Center of Studies in Law and Religion that will take place in Uberlandia, Brazil, between 16 and 18 of June 2020. The Competition is designed to contribute to the training of law students in subjects related to International Human Rights Law as well as Law and Religion.
Amid the scramble to find a cure for the coronavirus and, in the meantime, to enforce restrictive measures to try to slow down its expansion, there’s been relatively little attention to the underlying factors which may explain why some places have been harder hit, more quickly, than others.
One emerging hypothesis, however, is that there may be a correlation between declining fertility rates and rapidly rising elderly populations in many societies around the world, and the extent to which those societies have been impacted by the coronavirus.
For the Catholic Church, which has sounded alarms about declining fertility for decades, the situation could offer a grim confirmation of its diagnosis that a rapidly aging society places its future in jeopardy – though no one’s likely to celebrate that it’s required a global pandemic which, to date, has claimed more than 7,000 lives, to put the issue back on the table. . . .
I want to thank one of our loyal MOJ readers, Anne, for passing this along.
While we face the coronavirus pandemic, let us turn to the face of God in prayer and ask for His healing, His help and His protection. We will pray for all who are affected, for all who are sick and suffering, for all those who work in the medical profession, and for those who have died as well as for their grieving family members.
Even as the world, and Washington, D.C., has turned its attention to addressing the coronavirus, a slow but persistent revolution is underway in an area of policy that usually has flown under almost everyone’s radar. That issue is international religious freedom, or IRF, as we in the business call it, and the impact of this revolution could be felt for many years to come.
The Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School was scheduled to host our inaugural Rice-Hasson Distinguished Lecture on March 30th with our very special guest, Mary Ann Glendon. While we are disappointed that the COVID-19 public health emergency has closed our campus for the time being, we look forward to rescheduling this event for the coming fall.
Personally, this moment in our history has made me reflect on the true value of face to face interaction and how we learn best and grow together when part of a community. Our university President, Fr. John Jenkins made an excellent point recently in a video addressed to the Notre Dame community. That is, we are a community even when we are far apart geographically. That’s true. Notre Dame students will continue to learn from their professors, although remotely. Notre Dame scholars will continue to say and write important things, although many of them without the benefit and luxury of our beautiful campus with the presence of students and colleagues. I’m not sure when we will all return to campus and have the chance to gather and learn together again. But, I know I’ll never take it for granted.
Just a note for any who were interested: due to the coronavirus threat, this event has been postponed until next fall. We'll post the date as soon as it's available.
It is, I realize, fashionable to roll one's eyes (or do worse!) over David Brooks's meaning-mongering, but . . . I thought this essay, "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake", was a really good read. (I'd also recommend Brad Wilcox's response.) In more than a view places, Brooks touches on themes that resonate with Catholic anthropology. For example:
As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.
The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.
Interestingly, many "progressives" who will (reflexively?) recoil from what might seem "conservative" in Brooks's piece also tend to support a political figure, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who made many consonant points in her "controversial" 2004 book, The Two Income Trap.
Recently some pro-family advocates presented a petition to Professor Mary Ann Glendon in her capacity as chairing the U.S. State Department's Commission on Unalienable Rights. Although I had not signed the petition or authorized my signature to be attached to it, the organizers added my name. When I called the mistake to their attention, they promptly removed my name, although by then media coverage of the petition had mentioned me as a signatory. The error was, I have no doubt, an innocent one, since I am well-known to be in sympathy with the organizers' principal aims. I am grateful to them for promptly rectifying it.
In the Church Life Journal, a great piece from Pierre Manent. A bit:
I believe that the most precise way to designate what afflicts us, what troubles and demoralizes us, is to say simply: we no longer know what law is; we have lost the intelligence of law. The point is not to deplore that we disobey the law, that our morals are disordered, that the youth, as is often said, are without standards—all that is perhaps true, but the main point is that we no longer understand what the law is about. We no longer understand law according to its essence. We no longer understand law as the rule and measure of action. Our most urgent task is therefore to recover the intelligence of law as rule and measure of action. Thomas Aquinas is certainly the author who can best help us—Christians as well as non-Christians confronted with the loss of law’s meaning—to carry out this task, if only we make the effort to understand his work in its full amplitude. Our purpose is nevertheless not so much to expound Thomas’s restorative views as to examine our predicament more closely.
I have said that we have lost an understanding of law, or law’s intelligence. We have not lost it by inadvertence or negligence. We have lost it because we wanted to lose it. More precisely, we have fled from law. We are still fleeing from it. We have been fleeing from law since we took up the project—let us call it “the modern project”—to organize common life, the human world, on a basis other than law. We have been fleeing from the law since we undertook to regulate our actions otherwise than by law, to seek the rule of our actions elsewhere than in law. This is not a matter of a moment’s distraction or mistake. What is at stake is an immense enterprise to which we owe, for better and for worse, the driving and ordering of our common life over three or four centuries.
