So are retreats, reflections, and Catholic courses that fill the worship void. Sunday Mass is widely available to follow online. By contrast, in the West, many Christians have voiced their frustration with the closure of churches, but most seem to accept the prudence of the decision. In Iran and other Muslim countries, crowds have stormed closed mosques in order to worship.
One other notable fact makes this crisis different: people’s religious response. For rich nations and their elites, the party’s over. But we’ve become very skilled at evading the thought it will actually happen to us. Everyone knows that he or she will one day die.
Today’s pandemic is also different, and far more survivable, due to the ability of medical authorities to understand and respond to the crisis.Īt the same time, today’s crisis is similar to the past in the shadow of mortality it casts over cultures that had grown fat for decades in self-confidence, distractions, and wealth. But the great majority of people who contract it will recover. Coronavirus is a serious matter, with high risk for certain age and health groups, and very contagious. Our current virus situation is both different from – and similar to – pandemics in the past. These losses, in turn, colored the character and course of the churches for many decades. In ministering to the ill, clergy and religious sustained stunningly high losses. This led to widespread “repentance, self-chastisement, and prayer.” Demands on the churches were heavy. On those who survived the ordeal, “it impressed the idea that ‘you could be struck down at any moment without warning,’ so you should focus on your immortal soul.” Each of these pandemics happened in Christian cultures. Snowden focused largely on Europe’s Medieval and Renaissance bouts of the Black Plague. The same theme – the power of disease to drive civilizational change – was picked up this past weekend (March 28-29) by Yale historian Frank Snowden in a Wall Street Journal profile. Or so argues William Rosen in his compelling 2007 story of Europe’s first great pandemic, Justinian’s Flea. And it effectively ended the age of Late Antiquity. It left both empires ripe for Islamic expansion in the next century.
It crippled both the Byzantine and Persian Empires for generations. The plague derailed the Emperor Justinian’s efforts to restore the Roman Empire in the West. Within five months, it killed up to half of the Byzantine capital’s populace. Migrating up the Nile River on the bodies of rats, it came to the granaries of Alexandria. Through that flea and countless others, it morphed into something quite different. Sometime in the early 6th Century in Africa, a bacterium that caused mild illness found a promising new host: a flea.
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