Pandemic

Fr. Leo Pabayo

PANDEMICS, pestilence, plagues… happened at various times and places in history. An oft-repeated reaction of religious people to such disasters is that they are God’s punishment for the sins of the people. Just recently, a seminarian who visited us spoke of meeting some people who said that the eruption of the Taal volcano and the novel coronavirus pandemic are God’s punishment for our sins.

This reminded me of the novel, “The Plague” by a French-Algerian writer Albert Camus that we discussed in the 1960s in our class on Modern Philosophy for the philosophical and theological ideas underlying the novel. I searched Google recently and found that it has a chapter by chapter summary of the novel.

The setting of the novel is an Algerian town of Oran that is suffering from the bubonic plague. Of interest to me in the novel is the priest of the town, Fr. Paneloux, who preached that the plague was a punishment of God for the sins of the people of the town. However, he had a radical change of mind when he was called to minister to a child victim of the plague. The encounter with the innocent child shook him. It changed his thinking on the plague. He no longer saw it as a punishment but something ordained by God for some good. The good in his mind presumably is that such a disaster draws people to have faith in God. With this in mind, he refuses medical treatment and eventually dies. But the doctor, Dr. Bernard Rieux who is the main character in the novel, declares that the priest’s death was not necessarily due to the plague and listed it as a “doubtful case.” 

Fr. Paneloux’s thought on the plague is partly true but extremist and simplistic and not consistent with the teaching of the Bible. It should be noted that the priest in the novel is a product of the imagination of the novelist. A real Catholic priest does not think the way he does.

One must consider that the author, Albert Camus, espoused the “Philosophy of the Absurd” that teaches that life cannot be explained. This philosophy gained prominence sometime in the 1960s. It is an erroneous philosophy basically because there is reason and purpose for the life God has given us. This is the opposite extreme of the Rationalist Philosophy of the so-called Age of Enlightenment that wanted to cast faith as being opposed to reason.

It will help us to think rightly on the meaning of punishment in relation to faith and reason as taught by the Bible and the Church. This has implications on the way we deal with a pandemic or plague.

 First of all, strictly speaking, God does not punish. Some prophets indeed said that God punishes. But the experts on the Bible or the exegetes tell us, many of the so-called acts of God in the Bible are “anthropomorphisms” which means – projecting to God our narrow understanding of God. Many of these are corrected by some prophets themselves and the teaching of the Church. In the Bible, God himself says, “my thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways, as high as the heavens are from the earth so are my ways…”

We have a very limited understanding of God. The one whom we can trust most to give us the true understanding of God is God Himself in the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ who became man to teach us the right understanding of God.

The punishment that we read about in the Bible is related to God’s love and an act of God saving us. To use an analogy, like Godparents sometimes find the need to punish their children, but the punishment is always in the context of the parents’ love for their children.

In the Gospels, we learn that out of love Christ took upon himself the punishment that we deserve for our sin that we may be saved and gain eternal life.

Another way of understanding punishment is that it is really something that we inflict on ourselves whenever we ignore the wisdom of God. The word, “punishment”, comes from the Latin word “poene” which means pain. When we ignore the wisdom of God, it results in pain to us and disorder in creation.

The wisdom of God is like the word that he speaks in creating the world. Whenever he said, “let there be…” something new comes into being that is good. If we live by his word something good comes into our life that makes us happy. But when we ignore the word or wisdom of God and do wrong we cause a disorder in ourselves and the world. The immediate effect is pain and some loss of joy in us.   

Concerning the idea that a plague or pandemic as punishment from God, the Bible teaches us that we have been in the state of punishment from the very first time that our first parents decided to go against the wisdom of God. The divinely inspired prophet who preached or wrote the Book of Genesis is teaching us about the “original sin” that started the disorder in us and creation. He taught this using a parable or mythical story. In this story God told our first parents that they may eat of anything in paradise (enjoy life) but not of the “forbidden fruit” (go against the natural order of creation or the natural law) or they will get sick and die. Instead of heeding God’s wisdom they chose to eat of the “forbidden fruit”, meaning to say, to violate the natural law) resulting in disorder and pain. Thus it is right to say that we have been in a state of sin and punishment from the beginning which is evident in the disorder in the world and our life resulting in various kinds of sickness and death.

However, the Bible also teaches that from the beginning we can live in hope because God has been working to get us back in line. In the mythical story, the writer sees in the serpent the image of the tempter to which God says,

Because you have done this, you are cursed among all cattle, and the beasts of the earth: upon your breast you shall go, and earth shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmities between you and the woman, and your seed and her seed: she shall crush your head, and you shalt lie in wait for her heel. (Genesis: 3, 14-15)

God’s love and care for our first parents despite their sin continue as shown in the following verse.

And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife, garments of skins, and clothed them. (Genesis: 3, 21)

The Bible teaches us that Abraham, broke loose from the confused mind of our ancestors and decided to heed God. He and his descendants, the patriarchs after him and the prophets responded to the inspiration of the Spirit of God to change the course of human history back to God. This would take a long time because of human obstinacy. But when we were ready for the final change, God himself came down to be one of us as man, in the person of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (to be continued)