One of the more predictable byproducts of the coronavirus
pandemic has been an uptick in apocalyptic warnings that the end of the world
is at hand. The folks who send me emails announcing that COVID-19 signals the
arrival of the End Times mean well, and their eagerness to spread the news is
understandable. But they’re missing the point —
two or three points, in fact.
The first is that Jesus himself discouraged this kind of
speculation. In Matthew’s Gospel it goes like this: “Of that day and hour no
one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but the Father only. … Watch
therefore, for you do not know at what hour your Lord is to come” (Mt 24:36,
42).
With that said, though, there really is a sense — point number
two — that we’re living in the End Times. But there’s nothing new about that.
For the End Times date back a good 2,000 years — to the resurrection and
ascension of Christ — and will continue until he comes again, whenever that may
be. Meantime our only certainty is that each of us will be meeting Christ and
rendering an account to him sooner than we probably expect.
The current apocalyptic furor has numerous historical precedents.
People in earlier times reacted the same way to plagues and disasters. Now it’s
the turn of the coronavirus. But — point number three — the real lesson of this
pandemic isn’t that the End Times are here. Instead, the pandemic is an
especially graphic reminder that the human race is a global family, albeit a
painfully fractured one, so that the right response to plagues and disasters is
to seek divine assistance while simultaneously calling on the largely unrealized
resources of human solidarity.
Popes have underlined the fundamental oneness of the human family
often and forcefully. To take only one example among many, consider something
Pope Pius XII, much maligned for supposed indifference to the Holocaust, said in
his first encyclical.
The time was October, 1939, less than two months after the German
invasion of Poland touched off World War II. The overriding cause of the tragic
conflict then emerging, Pius XII wrote, was the repudiation of human solidarity
so painfully visible in racism and exaggerated nationalism — an obvious
reference to Nazi Germany and, to a lesser extent, Fascist Italy.
Deploring these “pernicious errors,” the pope denounced
“forgetfulness of that law of human solidarity and charity which is dictated
and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all
men, to whatever people they belong” as well as by the redemption of all by
Christ. The Nazis knew Pius XII meant them, and he was on their enemies list
from then on.
No doubt about it, the coronavirus pandemic is cause for concern.
But people fretting about the End Times — and the rest of us, too — would do
well to focus on another, even more threatening disaster now taking shape: the
impending world food crisis in which it’s said as many as 230 million people — as
usual, poor people in poor countries — could face starvation and death. Caritas
Internationalis, the international federation of Catholic charities
organizations, says this “aftershock of the pandemic” could prove to be “even
more complicated and more deadly” than the impact of the virus itself.
America was slow in responding to the coronavirus, and people
died as a result. Will we also be slow responding to this crisis? Here is a
genuinely apocalyptic challenge to human solidarity that deserves our attention
while there’s still time.
Shaw writes from Washington.