Bishop Paprocki: Catholic Church Can Provide a Clear Path for COVID-19 Response

The National Catholic Register ^ | 9/18/20 | Judy Roberts

[marshmallow]

Catholic principles of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life can aid society’s approach to pandemic, the Illinois bishop says in a recent essay.

As the coronavirus shutdowns stretched into months, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, realized he was witnessing something extraordinary.

“I had never seen anything like this in my life,” he told Register correspondent Judy Roberts in an interview in mid-September.

What he observed caused the vice president of the Illinois Catholic Health Association to draw on his background in medical ethics and apply the standard of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life to evaluate the response to COVID-19.

Bishop Paprocki has since written an essay, “Social Shutdowns as an Extraordinary Means of Saving Human Lives” for the September issue of Ethics & Medics, the National Catholic Bioethics Center’s newsletter. Although addressed to a Catholic audience, he hopes the essay will reach those charged with making decisions during a second COVID-19 wave, if there is one, or when considering how to respond to another virus or even the annual flu.

“The Catholic Church provides principles like these, but I think our moral principles are not just for Catholics,” he said. “They’re for the common good.”

Bishop Paprocki, an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School, is sending a copy of his essay to Attorney General William Barr and would like others in positions of influence to see it as well.

“If the question does come up about locking everything down again,” he said, “I’m hoping they will take some of these moral principles into consideration and say perhaps we don’t have to take such draconian measures, but more ordinary measures to protect life.”

In his essay, Bishop Paprocki proposes that the Catholic principles of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life, first articulated by Pope.......

[F450-V10]

Thanks for posting. Excellent points and brilliant to equate with heroic means of prolonging life in medical situations.

[eens]

It’s not a bad start looking at the lockdown issue. It looks at our human condition of living with risk that we all must accept. It attempts to frame the lockdown as an extraordinary means of saving lives, as contrasted with ordinary means, i.e., the ways we’ve historically dealt with diseases. It’s a decent analysis, as far as it goes.

The weaknesses I see are twofold. First, we shouldn’t even allow the notion that a lockdown has any significant effect in reducing loss of life in the case of an easily transmitted virus. There’s no scientific basis for it, and covid death stats don’t show any benefit in hindsight.

Second, the letter barely touches on the horrible effects of lockdowns. It doesn’t mention suicides (I’m basing this only on the article.) The fact that excess deaths due to heart attacks and suicides have outstripped covid deaths for months now gives lie to any notion that lockdowns save lives. When the economic devastation finally settles in, there will be a multitude of deaths in poor areas of the world. Estimates are that starvation deaths might outstrip covid deaths around the world. Sometimes the undesired secondary effects render an action totally inadmissible. Such are lockdowns.

[FamiliarFace]

I love this article, and I agree with this bishop.

Locking down has been an extraordinary burden.