We’re entering uncharted territory on our COVID-19 journey. As jurisdictions across the country roll out plans to ease pandemic restrictions, never will our faith be more needed, or tested, than in the months to come.
The Sunday New York Times full front-page listing of 1,000 names from among the nearly 100,000 who’ve died of COVID-19 was a bold, imaginative, powerful journalistic gesture.
Smear campaign
Re: Don’t Judge Pius XII yet, expert warns (May 10):
If ever there was a smear campaign, the one against Pope Pius XII is one for the history books. Having studied his pontificate, I am convinced that the campaign against him has done considerable damage against a man who was acclaimed in the late 1940s-early ’50s by so many Jews, including the Jewish State of Israel, as a hero for all he did during the Second World War.
As the world begins to stir from its pandemic hibernation, governments face the important question of how to accommodate houses of worship. At least, we hope they realize the question is important.
COVID-19 threw an interesting twist into a recent visit with the memory specialist. I was advised by e-mail my appointment would be conducted via video e-consult. I looked at the Bride and wondered, “What is e-consult?” The next morning we were staring into our laptop where the specialist appeared.
I am aware I write a lot about my pain. There is a good reason. Pain, specifically spinal pain, has been the dominant force in my life for nine years. It is what I wake up to every morning, it is what I carry around during the day and it is the last thing I feel before falling asleep … and it is what wakes me up through the night when pain is more acute.
April, according to T.S. Eliot, is the cruellest month.
Needs of faithful
Re: Cautious approach to re-open churches (May 10):
I am very surprised that Canada’s bishops are reluctant to press our government to ease restrictions on churches.
We tend to think of the planet as a patchwork of nations and continents, but it is really a single tapestry in which everything and everyone is intertwined. The COVID-19 pandemic is tragic evidence of that, but the new coronavirus only illuminates a lesson taught to us already.
At a time when mother nature has “sent us to our rooms” (as one viral post put it), the digital world has opened its arms wide to embrace us. It is a reality that I have been reflecting on during this pandemic.
In Alberta, the province where I live, those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic are workers in meat processing plants.