Diabolical COVID-19 keeps hands of comfort at bay

National Post, 17 April 2020

How tragic that the hands that would bring comfort from a daughter to the face of her dying mother are now pressed only against the glass.

There was news just before Easter about a Catholic priest who did not want to leave his flock during the pandemic restrictions. That would apply quite broadly I would think. What makes this priest unusual is that he is a prison chaplain.

As Corrections Canada limited those coming into prisons, where close quarters make the pandemic a graver threat, chaplaincy services were curtailed or eliminated. In response, this priest chaplain — his name and location withheld for security reasons — offered to become a prisoner himself. He would be incarcerated along with the prisoners he served as long as the pandemic restrictions lasted. Corrections did not permit his request.

That dramatic offer highlights one curious aspect of the pandemic. There are those who work closely with the infected, the sick and the dying. These are the “front-line” — a term borrowed from war, which tells us something about the pressures some of them face — health-care workers who are the object of so much deserved praise. But there are others with whom medical personnel usually work closely — chaplains, social workers and, most closely, families — who are now kept at a distance. No doctor or nurse thinks that’s a good thing, but now it is a necessary thing.

Thinking about all that on Good Friday and in this Easter season, it seemed to me that this is a particularly diabolical aspect of the coronavirus.

The virus has many diabolical aspects. One of them is that the washing of hands has now become the most important public health duty. Nothing wrong with that from a hygiene point of view, but it must bring a sinister smile to Satan that the great symbol of evading responsibility is now the responsible thing to do. Pontius Pilate washed his hands that first Good Friday but could not rid himself of the guilt. Shakespeare would use Lady Macbeth to teach us the same lesson.

I have been thinking about hands recently. For clergy, the hands are our instruments of blessing, of comfort, of service. On the day of my ordination, like all Catholic priests, my hands were anointed by the bishop.

How diabolical that the hands anointed to handle the Sacred Host may now carry a deadly virus so that Holy Communion might become unholy contagion!

How diabolical that hands anointed so that they might in turn anoint the sick person are now to be kept gloved and sterile lest the promise of life eternal be accompanied by the peril of natural death.

It is not only sacerdotal hands that are restricted in these days of course.

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