COVID-19: A Crisis and a Tragedy—What’s Next?

Abstract

Reflecting on the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, theological ethics examines political dynamics, focuses on those affected, discusses hard ethical choices, comments on religious engagements, considers language choices, reflects on the impact on ordinary lives, and ponders what should follow after controlling the infection. Learning from the past and the present, looking forward requires targeted engagements aimed at promoting health, a critical rethinking of human progress, a renewed solidarity accompanied by social reforms, and a sustainable future.

In early October 2020, the US editorial team of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published an unprecedented editorial on the pandemic caused by the coronavirus called COVID-19. The editors wrote, “Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership.” ¹ But, “in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.” ²

Whether one looks at the US, Europe, Latin America (particularly Brazil), Asia (especially India), or South Africa, the numbers of those infected and of those who died are shocking and keep increasing. ³ Each day the media update the macabre totals. Likely, the world will see better days when effective vaccines will be available, people will be vaccinated, and the pandemic will be controlled.

It might appear odd or even misplaced to begin writing on the COVID global health emergency by pointing to political leadership and to its failures in preventing and then containing the spreading of the infection, saving lives, protecting the economy, and supporting those in need. ⁴ Such a choice is less surprising, however, if one considers how the health of the people depends on and is influenced by the whole cohort of social and political determinants of health. ⁵ Just to give an example, while civil society asks researchers to produce and test vaccines that will stimulate our bodily immunity to COVID-19, the forthcoming vaccination campaign will require not only the engagement of the national healthcare systems and healthcare professionals, but also the political arrangements that will make vaccines freely available to the whole humanity and that will foster a rapid vaccination process.

Moreover, while the world waits for vaccines, as the editors of the NEJM argue—together with many scientists, healthcare professionals, and experts in global public health—simple public health measures help civil society to contain the pandemic: physical distancing in social contexts, wearing masks, washing one’s hands thoroughly, contact tracing, diagnostic testing, isolation of infected people, quarantine, travel limitations, and focused lockdowns of social activities and interactions. ⁶ These public health measures are not technology driven, can be embraced easily, and have proven to be effective in containing the infection—except for those who, because of their poverty and social context, have only difficult access to clean water, soap, and masks and cannot implement physical distancing. However, the political will to support even these simple measures with adequate financial resources depends on political action. Regrettably, in too many countries, disinformation, populist demagogy, and the partisan politicization of public health strategies have worsened people’s health.

Theological discourse joined committed scientists and dedicated civil servants in fostering awareness, hearing and addressing the pleas of the needy, promoting health and the common good, and practicing solidarity in concrete ways. ⁷ In the following pages, I engage selected global theological contributions by focusing on moral agents affected and involved, including their ethical decisions, religious engagements, and ordinary experiences; language choices made during pandemic times; and post-COVID concerns.

Looking Down

On November 5, 2020, Neapolitans woke up to discover a provocative white marble sculpture placed at the center of their most important square, Piazza del Plebiscito (Plebiscite Square): a chained baby lying down in a fetal position. Naked, with closed eyes and looking tired, the baby’s name is Homeless. Appropriate for this time of COVID lockdowns, the sculpture is called “Look Down” and invites each passerby to stop and look down at the human condition, chained by the health emergency and by the economic crisis heightened and exasperated by the ongoing pandemic. ⁸ Looking down is never easy. It makes us feel that our whole self is pulled down, not only our eyes and gaze. But looking down also becomes a response to cries addressed to those with responsibilities and power who do not sufficiently look down at those who are greatly suffering from the pandemic, who are voiceless and powerless, urging the powerful to pay attention and help.

Questioning Science and Society

By looking down at the current global pandemic and how it affects humanity, what one notices is quite diverse. A cohort of scientists—from epidemiologists, to biologists, to geneticists—joined experts in global public health and healthcare practitioners in their global efforts aimed at identifying the virus, defining how it affects people, clarifying who is susceptible and why, testing available therapies, and implementing effective public health measures.

Across continents and in collaborative ways, researchers responded to the emergency with urgency by sharing their findings and answering some of the many scientific questions regarding the virus, the spreading of the pandemic, and the treatments. However, their search to understand has been tainted by too familiar wrong assumptions centered on racially based biology.

There is no evidence at this point that race affects one’s predisposition to suffer from COVID. ⁹ As far as we know, susceptibility to COVID-19 is intrinsic neither to Blackness nor to any other racial or ethnic group. A racialized understanding of biology is scientifically wrong and socially harmful. ¹⁰ It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for being infected by this coronavirus and dying. Critically examining the availability of testing and healthcare services (for instance, how people can access drive-in testing if they do not have a car), the quality of life in communities and neighborhoods plagued by toxic pollutants, the access to affordable healthy foods, and the types of jobs available tell us why Black, Brown, and indigenous people are disproportionately affected. ¹¹ Inequities in all aspects of personal and social life—including poor housing, educational segregation, overrepresentation in prisons and jails, and inadequate social services—are negatively influencing people’s ability to live healthy and flourishing lives, enhancing one’s predisposition to get sick, and hindering the ability to get well when one falls sick.

As rightly argued by the epidemiologist and family physician Camara Phyllis Jones, ¹² racism “has led people of color to be more exposed and less protected from the virus and has burdened them with chronic diseases.” ¹³ If reporting data disaggregated by race were gathered, they would highlight the consequences of the existing multiple structural inequities and could allow care providers to respond by providing testing and healthcare services to those who lack them and who are affected the most. ¹⁴ As Catholic social teaching reminds us, integral development requires a preferential option for the poor that aims at addressing their needs.

Tragically, in the US context, in recent months, racism and the COVID pandemic have been intertwined in another equally disturbing way because of the repeated police brutality against people of color. ¹⁵ Many of the short essays of fifteen scholars of religious ethics, published by the Journal of Religious Ethics under the title “COVID and Religious Ethics,” struggle with the pandemic’s complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political challenges and discuss how the pandemic might influence future reflections within religious ethics. ¹⁶

These fifteen contributions help to identify how fear and uncertainty might lead to social distrust instead of listening to marginalized people and communities (Vincent Floyd) and fostering public engagement (James Childress) with mutual participation and responsibility (Aaron Stalnaker). As Ronald Green writes, “a society cannot survive if it fails to affirm the dignity of all its members and protect the lives and well-being of all its citizens, including the least off.” ¹⁷ Moreover, because of our fundamental equality in vulnerability and dependence on God (Jennifer Herdt), our ecological moral personhood (Willis Jenkins) and agency (Irene Oh) can be renewed and strengthened by recognizing problematic social conditions at the intersection of politics, law, history, theology, and religion (Cathleen Kaveny) and by intervening to prevent and protect people from harm (Elizabeth Antus). As a result, participation in the public sphere will promote the dignity of work (Jonathan Malesic), facilitate implementing just policies (Shannon Dunn), and foster concrete solidarity (Alda Balthrop-Lewis), including humanitarianism and transnational cooperation (Eric Gregory and Toni Alimi). Finally, as David Newheiser argues, hope will enable us “to resist the pacifying pull of complacency and despair.” ¹⁸

While James Keenan stresses how “the call to recognize Black Lives Matter in the middle of a pandemic is a call to recognize the original sin of the US,” ¹⁹ Philip Landrigan and colleagues notice how, during the pandemic, Black Lives Matter has become a global reality able to foster social structural transformation. ²⁰ To recognize our personal and collective sin shakes our conscience, leads to a greater personal and social awareness, rekindles our desire for just changes, empowers us to join others in promoting urgent transformations, and becomes an opportunity to ask for the gift of personal and social conversion. ²¹

The Suffering People

In every health crisis there are people and sectors of society who are more affected than others because of diverse factors: from age to living conditions, and from social location to access to healthcare services, healthy foods, and clean water. These people should receive privileged attention and care. The COVID pandemic has confirmed the relevance of these social factors and has tragically expanded the sheer number of people suffering.

Various authors help us to recognize and name people and their dire situations: from people with disabilities; ²² to the over seventy million refugees and forcibly displaced people; ²³ to the challenges faced by migrants, ²⁴ remembering that, “in this evolving public health crisis and its long recovery, recognizing immigrants as social citizens of the places where immigrants live and work and mitigating their embodied vulnerabilities should be integral to public health ethics.” ²⁵

If one considers the age of those affected, the elderly have suffered the most, but younger people too have not been left unscathed, ²⁶ and low-income families struggle to feed their children without the support of schools’ meal plans. ²⁷ When one includes the “over 735 million people in the world living in extreme poverty,” ²⁸ those with preexisting poor health, and marginalized groups (for instance, people without jobs and homes), the scale of human suffering that has been exacerbated by the global pandemic is stunning.

Any narrow understanding of what is at stake that privileges national interests, instead of that comprising the lived experience of the whole world, is disheartening. Health is a shared good and when people lack the possibility of protecting their health, the whole world suffers. As “a human family in a common home,” ²⁹ people should strive to promote the global common good as the fruit of global solidarity. ³⁰

Coping with Hard Times and Choices

With great generosity and impressive dedication, healthcare professionals have been at the frontline of the pandemic, caring for the sick even at the expense of their physical, mental, and spiritual health—in many cases with limited availability of protective personal equipment—while too many succumbed to the infection. Many healthcare professionals are experiencing burnout because of the overwhelming working hours and the emotional distress that they endure, with the difficulty to mourn and grieve for the lost lives. They also show adverse psychological outcomes and depression. Caring for the caretakers, even providing psychotherapeutic support, should be a priority. ³¹

In the early phases of the pandemic, both in European countries and in the US, the overwhelming number of patients in critical respiratory conditions—mostly advanced in age—stressed the ability of healthcare institutions to provide the needed treatment, such as ventilators, to all. Rationing became not only a debated theme in healthcare circles and within bioethics, but an urgency in daily practice. Criteria, guidelines, and even an algorithm were proposed to address issues of scarcity by considering the patients’ age, their quality of life, and their expected life-years. ³²

Daniel Daly joins this conversation by articulating values, virtues, and guidelines that should inform rationing of treatments in Catholic contexts. As Daly indicates, human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, the common good, and the stewardship of resources should frame any reflection on rationing and inform decisions and actions. ³³ Hence, to affirm human dignity, “the common good and the preferential option for the poor should guide the distribution of scarce health care resources.” ³⁴ Moreover, “in a situation of medical scarcity, the obligation to responsibly steward limited resources commands the medical facility to determine which patients will be offered and which will be denied access to these resources. There is no moral obligation to do what is impossible.” ³⁵ Finally, instead of blanket decisions (for instance, those based on age or one’s expected quality of life), specific virtues—such as charity, prudence, mercy, and solidarity—should guide virtuous case-by-case rationing, always assessing the expected benefits and their likely duration. ³⁶

During the current pandemic, rationing exemplifies some of the many hard choices that healthcare professionals, administrators, first responders, and chaplains need to make and that test their emotional, mental, spiritual, professional, and relational health. ³⁷ Kate Jackson-Meyer helps us to consider the moral impact of these hard decisions by naming the moral distress that is experienced, with its accompanying pain and suffering, and by pointing to resources to address it. ³⁸ As she writes, “moral distress can occur even when moral agents believe they acted in the best way possible.” ³⁹ Moreover, it encompasses three diverse stages that depend on one’s emotional proximity with or distance from the stressful situation: the “initial distress,” the delayed “reactive distress,” and the “moral residue” that persists after an ethically challenging event. Finally, moral distress harms one’s “moral integrity” because “transgressing moral values undercuts one’s sense of self” and agency. ⁴⁰ It is this last harm that “differentiates moral distress from emotional stress and PTSD.” ⁴¹

To build one’s moral resilience and to strive for inner healing, Jackson-Meyer highlights the importance of recognizing one’s moral agency, that is, “one’s ability to intend and to act,” as well as “ethics education, meditation, opportunities to process distressing events and institutional efforts to reduce future moral distress.” ⁴² Caring for the caregivers, and for everyone, is an urgent social call. ⁴³

Religious Silences vs. Timely Voices and Needed Actions

During the times of lockdown, because of the reduced activities, a great social silence dominated entire nations, churches included, like a liturgically and spiritually prolonged Holy Saturday. Silence can be hope-filled with longing and prayerful expectation, but it can also point to an absence, even a culpable vacuum. ⁴⁴

In the spirit of subsidiarity, religious communities should foster authentic relational interactions and provide moral leadership by helping civil society to recognize the ordeals suffered by many people and promote concrete engagements that contribute in responding to the many urgent needs across the globe. ⁴⁵ Many positive examples abound, centered on the actions of people of good will, families, communities, and religiously inspired organizations (whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or Muslim) providing relief to the needy, visiting (Mt 25:31–46) and accompanying them.

Among the theological contributions addressing the COVID pandemic, some search for meaning ⁴⁶ or focus on pastoral engagements, ⁴⁷ often turning to the Bible for inspiration. ⁴⁸ Among the latter, N. T. Wright stresses lament as a way forward, as an antidote against too rapid answers to the ordeal of suffering. ⁴⁹ One wonders, however, whether, in the case of the Catholic hierarchy (for example, in the US), more vocal, critical voices were missing and more committed lobbying for state and federal policies and initiatives could have been embraced. The stress on safe liturgical and sacramental procedures during the resumption of cultic practices is appropriate, but it also could be motivated by a desire to avoid possible lawsuits were people to become infected while attending services in churches and places of worship. What seems to be missing are ways to manifest genuine care for God’s people, who are struggling and feeling left alone or even abandoned by their shepherds. During the pandemic, any hierarchical and institutional silence is deafening, outrageous, and an ethically unacceptable example of hierarchicalism. ⁵⁰ Embracing a more consistent ethic of life stands as yet to be fully realized.

In contrast, Pope Francis has been vocal and compassionate, providing focused teaching ⁵¹ and prayerful pastoral leadership with continued attention to the pleas of those affected by the pandemic, calling for urgent international collaboration, supporting scientific research, advocating for future vaccination campaigns that benefit all people and particularly the poor, ⁵² articulating a vision regarding the post-COVID world, ⁵³ funding projects to address immediate needs, ⁵⁴ and committing the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development to funding projects and initiatives in the short, medium, and long term. ⁵⁵

Words Matter

As in the case of Pope Francis, actions speak louder than words, but words matter. In its July 2020 document on the human community in the time of COVID, the Pontifical Academy for Life stressed how “the prevailing metaphors now encroaching on our ordinary language emphasize hostility and a pervasive sense of menace: the repeated encouragements to ‘fight’ the virus, the press releases that sound like ‘bulletins of war,’ the daily updates on the number of infected, soon turning into ‘fallen victims.’” ⁵⁶ This “pandemic language,” as Franklin Miller calls it, “can illuminate, and it can distort.” ⁵⁷ Choosing such a language, with the war metaphors that populate it, obfuscates our responsibility to respond appropriately and provide high-quality healthcare services, hinders the fair assessment of preexisting social inequities, victimizes our agency, immobilizes our imagination, and demonizes pathogens like COVID-19. In a pandemic, healthcare professionals are not at war. They continue their mission and vocation to promote health.

While discarding unhelpful metaphors and discourses, alternative ways of thinking about this and other viruses are possible by stressing how “everything is interconnected,” ⁵⁸ as Pope Francis repeatedly emphasized in his two recent encyclical letters, Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, ⁵⁹ or, in Kaveny’s words, “everything around us has an integral part to play in the story of creation.” ⁶⁰

Science also can help us to avoid relying on metaphoric language that distracts and misleads instead of focusing our attention on the tasks ahead. As Dr. Anthony Fauci and colleagues stressed in March 2020, “the Covid-19 outbreak is a stark reminder of the ongoing challenge of emerging and reemerging infectious pathogens and the need for constant surveillance, prompt diagnosis, and robust research to understand the basic biology of new organisms and our susceptibilities to them, as well as to develop effective countermeasures.” ⁶¹

Misinformation, ⁶² distrust, and the partisan politicization of health issues and preventive practices accompanied the progression of the pandemic. Moreover, irresponsible choices, dangerous for the health of the public, scandalized the world. Two of them are worth mentioning. First, in the midst of this unprecedented global pandemic, on July 6, 2020, the US began the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), as previously anticipated by President Donald Trump, without paying its $198 million in membership dues and as a retaliation against the WHO’s handling of the early phases of the pandemic, particularly regarding China. ⁶³

Second, President Trump and his administration undermined the role and curtailed the responsibilities of the previously prestigious US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This occurred in multiple ways. First, both President Trump and his administration promoted a destructive politicization of the COVID crisis that made even wearing masks a contested political choice, “the false choice between public health and individual freedom.” ⁶⁴ Hence, future safeguards from negative political influence on matters of public health are needed. Second, science expertise and competence were neither appreciated nor valued. Reestablishing effective communication between CDC experts, the president, and his administration, as well as with governors and the public, is urgent. Third, accurate and extensive data collection is imperative to assess what is occurring and how to respond in targeted ways. The CDC should be empowered to monitor the pandemic and to identify how to help those affected. ⁶⁵ Trust is a precious commodity and value, both for people and for the organizations serving the health of citizens. To regain lost trust is an enduring moral task.

What You’re Doing

Together with words, actions matter, even when they are ordinary and one’s agency is limited and constrained. Daily, the email titled “Coronavirus Briefing,” prepared by the New York Times, reaches readers’ inboxes. It is a selection of news that allows one to monitor the global pandemic in the US and abroad. The message ends with the rubric “What you’re doing,” where, in a few lines, each day one or more persons from somewhere across the planet share what they are doing in the time of COVID. The chosen short story invites readers into the homes and lives of people coping with the pandemic’s numerous limitations and with their lifestyle changes. These are stories of ordinary vulnerable resilience. They are simple, moving, even comforting. They show how to hold on to, protect, and nurture relationships—with their partner, their loved ones far away, and their neighbors—while respecting face masking and physical distancing. ⁶⁶

What’s Next?

While the whole world experiences the global pandemic as a crisis and a tragedy, learns to live with the disease, addresses the urgent needs of millions of people, hopes for a prompt end of the pandemic, and works to achieve it, the attention also goes to the post-COVID. ⁶⁷ However, looking at what is next does not mean avoiding looking down, dismissing the ordeals, struggles, and challenges faced by humankind. Hence, in what follows, looking down joins looking forward by proposing actions aimed at promoting health, a critical rethinking of human progress, a renewed solidarity accompanied by social reforms, and a sustainable future.

The Health of the Public

During the COVID pandemic, the world experienced the unexpected inability to rely on technological solutions to face the pandemic and to prepare for the anticipated new waves of infection. For Bruce Jennings, this is not an occasional failure. A deeper transformation of how health is pursued in civil society is needed:

A new social contract with public health requires a new form of civic thinking, a new ethic of public health citizenship. To bring about the institutional and behavioral change that emergency preparedness and response require, it is essential to see health as genuinely “public,” as something that involves us all, as a common good, not as a commodity we pay for and consume. The quality of our collective and individual health depends upon an intricate web of cooperation and interdependence. ⁶⁸

To frame this broad context of reform, one can turn to the past, learning from the history of previous epidemics. ⁶⁹ Historically, as David Jones writes, “epidemics provide a sampling device for social analysis. They reveal what really matters to a population and whom they truly value.” ⁷⁰ For example, epidemics let surface “the desire to assign responsibility,” blaming the other, those who are different, reinforcing “existing social divisions of religion, race, ethnicity, class, or gender identity,” ⁷¹ and fostering stigmatization. Moreover, three constant reactive patterns can be identified: resistance to appreciating the early stages of infection; progressive recognition of its gravity; and, finally, targeted responses. ⁷²

What stopped past outbreaks were social-control measures, medications, and a vaccine. ⁷³ While the world hopes for a similar outcome, the WHO also aims to learn from the present, from the ongoing crisis, in order to articulate a focused proposal to address this pandemic and future ones. According to the WHO, we learned that “political leadership makes the difference . . . Preparedness is not only what governments do to protect their people, it is also what people do to protect each other . . . The impact of pandemics goes far beyond their immediate health effects . . . Current measures of preparedness are not predictive . . . The return on investment for global health security is immense . . . [and] No one is safe until all are safe.” ⁷⁴ Hence, the WHO calls for “Responsible leadership; Engaged citizenship; Strong and agile national and global systems for global health security; Sustained investment in prevention and preparedness, commensurate with the scale of a pandemic threat; [and] Robust global governance of preparedness for health emergencies.” ⁷⁵

Globally, healthcare resources are directed to address the COVID-19 pandemic, but in the Global South this means that other infectious diseases—such as diphtheria, cholera, poliovirus, and measles—already preventable through vaccination, are bouncing back because the regular vaccination programs have been disrupted or halted. ⁷⁶ The gains in saving lives achieved in recent years through immunization campaigns are threatened, with the risk of losing many lives, particularly among children and marginalized people. A comprehensive promotion of health, globally and locally, should respond efficiently to emerging pandemics, while, at the same time, addressing other pandemics (such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and opioids) ⁷⁷ and avoiding leaving behind patients who need regular vaccinations, screenings, therapies, and procedures. ⁷⁸

Vulnerable Resilience to Rethink Human Progress

Together with frontline professionals, in all sectors of society, personal and social vulnerabilities have been manifest and tested. ⁷⁹ The social preexisting conditions, hierarchies, and disparities, with the inequalities and inequities that they entail, have worsened the individual and collective experience of vulnerability. ⁸⁰ One might expect that the ethical response should lead us to overcome our vulnerabilities, aim at fostering resilience, and strive to return to the type of progress that humankind was pursuing before the COVID pandemic struck. However, both the resilience of the whole society and the dominant model of progress are challenged by the global pandemic. Resilience might mean embracing personal and social vulnerability, neither rejecting nor denying them. ⁸¹

Keenan encourages this critical retrieval of vulnerable resilience by proposing that “vulnerability is not something to escape but to embrace,” ⁸² because it describes “who we are today in light of the pandemic, that is, descriptively, and who we ought to be in light of the pandemic, that is, normatively.” ⁸³ Inspired by the philosopher Judith Butler, Keenan stresses how vulnerability is

not primarily about need but about the capacity to respond. Vulnerable people are able to hear the call of the other. Vulnerability is not first about weakness or neediness but about availability. This is precisely why people who suffer want to be accompanied by vulnerable people: they know that vulnerable people appreciate their predicament. If we want to respond to the other in need, we have to be vulnerable. ⁸⁴

Moreover, “some believe that the word ‘vulnerable’ means being or having been wounded. But that is not what the word means. To be vulnerable means to have the capacity to be wounded, to be exposed, at risk and responsive to the other.” ⁸⁵ Because “this notion of vulnerability . . . describes not only those at risk but more importantly the human condition,” ⁸⁶ it informs the moral task ahead: to “rethink human progress precisely in light of our precarity.” ⁸⁷

For Keenan, “recognition is the first response of vulnerable people.” ⁸⁸ Hence, humankind should recognize that the progress we have embraced and implemented has compromised “the future of our progeny.” ⁸⁹ As he writes, “COVID-19 has interrupted human progress and has found us lacking. Though our interdependency is in evidence in terms of our vulnerability to the virus, it definitely has not been in evidence in terms of our responding to it.” ⁹⁰

Rethinking human progress entails acknowledging our guilty conscience ⁹¹ and striving to recognize the signs of the times that are urging us to realize the needed social, political, cultural, ⁹² and ecclesial structural transformations while addressing the inequities that plague humankind with renewed and inclusive global solidarity. ⁹³

Solidarity and Reforms

As citizens, our relationality entails a strong commitment to promote solidarity. ⁹⁴ While Ruth Chadwick wonders what are the conditions that might promote social solidarity, ⁹⁵ Carlo Calleja turns to history, looking for insights by examining how those who preceded us addressed their crises. With the help of Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90), Basil the Great (330–79) replied with a “concerted response of solidarity” ⁹⁶ to the health crisis of his time—people affected by what they called leprosy, probably a non-infective skin disease—by creating welcoming hospices (basileias) that could foster personal flourishing and social integration centered on kinship. Fast forward, Calleja praises the ongoing local initiatives that, in the time of COVID, embody solidarity by accompanying and supporting people in need, providing them with food and care, and breaking their loneliness ⁹⁷ and isolation with “imagination, creativity, dedication and generosity.” ⁹⁸

Solidarity is not limited to interpersonal and communal contexts. It requires specific political choices able to generate great beneficial impact on economic dynamics for large numbers of people in need and for nations. ⁹⁹ In addressing the “tradeoff between economic prosperity and preserving human lives,” ¹⁰⁰ even when one wants “to err on the side of saving lives” ¹⁰¹ while avoiding reckless approaches, rigorous reflections on the gravity of the global economic crisis caused by this pandemic are necessary. ¹⁰² Millions of people have lost their jobs. Individuals and families experience hardships, ¹⁰³ insecurity, poverty, homelessness, and lack of availability of and access to healthcare services ¹⁰⁴ and education. ¹⁰⁵ Economic activities of every size are relying on national financial emergency packages as stop-gap measures. Entire sectors of economic production struggle (such as airline companies and the hospitality industry). Wide-reaching interventions are urgent.

Among the measures proposed to address the current economic havoc, Kate Ward argues for universal basic income, giving “each member of society a monthly infusion of cash, tax-funded, with no strings attached.” ¹⁰⁶ With this antipoverty action that avoids stigmatization, society will help protect the possibility of working—an essential dimension of human and social flourishing—“giving everyone a little more breathing space to do the work that connects, creates, and cares,” ¹⁰⁷ and creating cash-flow through the economy.

Focusing on particular nations, other structural interventions have been proposed. ¹⁰⁸ As an example, writing from Peru, Ana Gamara Rondinel argues for an urgent reform of the national fiscal policy centered on granting tax exemptions to the poor; compensating the loss of tax revenues by taxing the rich, who are less affected by the economic downturn caused by the current pandemic; and, finally, directing the fiscal revenues to promoting the country’s development. ¹⁰⁹ In such a way, the COVID crisis could become an opportunity for a fiscal new deal shaped by needed reforms and leading to just transformations. ¹¹⁰

At the international level, at the end of September 2020, the G7 Finance Ministers stated that, “to support our efforts to help the most vulnerable countries, we are implementing the G20-Paris Club Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) to suspend official bilateral debt payments for the poorest countries through end-2020.” ¹¹¹

A few days later, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and her colleagues stressed that, because of the pandemic, “ the Debt Service Suspension Initiative must be extended into 2021 . If not, its current recipients will be forced to resort to austerity measures to be able to resume debt service, compounding the human suffering already caused by the crisis.” ¹¹² Moreover, “there is a need to reform the international debt ‘architecture’ . . . to provide speedy and sufficiently deep debt relief to countries that need it, benefitting not only these countries but the system as a whole.” ¹¹³

In early November 2020, David Malpass, President of the World Bank, affirmed that, “with the pandemic, the debt burden has gotten much heavier due to the devastating contraction in output, remittances, and family income across the developing world. If this mounting debt goes unaddressed, it could lead to a lost decade for the world’s poorest people.” ¹¹⁴ He continued, “to create a recipe for recovery and growth, five ingredients are urgently needed—a sustained debt-service suspension, deep debt-burden reduction, fuller creditor participation, a level playing field to resolve debt crises, and debt transparency to protect the people.” ¹¹⁵

After the mid-October agreement of the G20 nations to extend the suspension of debt payments by an additional six months to support the most vulnerable countries struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, in mid-November 2020 the G20 representatives, gathered in Riyadh during the Extraordinary G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ meeting, recognized that “debt treatments beyond the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) may be required on a case-by-case basis.” ¹¹⁶ Hence, extraordinary times call for national and international urgent measures that, in our globalized world, could evoke some aspects of the yet unrealized Biblical jubilee (Lev 25:8–55).

A Sustainable Future

Landrigan and colleagues stress how, together with unimaginable suffering, “this time of crisis could also be a time of fundamental, even revolutionary, change” ¹¹⁷ because of “a remarkable worldwide reduction in ambient air pollution . . . [that translates] into fewer deaths from pollution-related disease.” ¹¹⁸ Hence, “cleaner air is possible,” ¹¹⁹ with gains in protecting people’s health. Looking at the future, “a massive global transition away from fossil fuels to clean, non-polluting renewable energy” ¹²⁰ would allow humankind “to imagine a world in which improvements in air quality are permanent, skies are blue, and the numbers of premature deaths caused by air pollution are greatly diminished.” ¹²¹ They continue: “This terrible pandemic and its consequences have given a clarity of vision and a unique opportunity to control air pollution, reduce inequality, save lives, and begin to heal the planet.” ¹²² Finally, “COVID-19 has brought our world to a point of crisis. Now we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to emerge from this crisis and to build a cleaner, healthier, and a more just world that we can deliver with pride to our children and grandchildren.” ¹²³

Conclusion

Human creativity is consoling, and it fosters hope. Eventually, vulnerable resilient human ingenuity will help in dismissing and replacing inept politicians and changing their harmful political choices, which are blind to the struggles of the poor and deaf to the pleas of the needy. Moreover, human goodness will foster concrete actions aimed at promoting the common good. Ecclesially, God’s people will help pastoral leaders and the hierarchy to embrace a consistent and inclusive ethic of life with its demanding set of multiple priorities: from countering racial discrimination to reforming law enforcement and the judicial and penal systems; from eliminating inequities in healthcare and education to fostering gender equality in society, the job market, and the church; from providing paths to citizenship for migrants and refugees to protecting the environment and the conditions for life on the planet.

The current pandemic is a global crisis. Our multiple inabilities—within science and healthcare, as well as in politics, society, and the church—have let it become a tragedy for too many countries and people across the planet. The time to act is now, by making this pandemic not a curse that will irreparably curtail our individual and collective flourishing, but a challenging possibility for fostering a more solidaristic way of life that will benefit us and future generations.