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Meditations on COVID-19
Catherine of Siena has a particularly relevant story as our world faces what could be the Black Death of MMXX. One hundred seventy years before the Protestant Reformation, the plague of the day swept through Siena, and by AD 1349, half the population was dead. Half. Fifty percent. Not one percent. Not two percent. Fifty. In some places even sixty percent. They didn’t have tests. So maybe somebody exaggerated. So let’s just round down to fifty. In the middle of this—the first of several such pandemics—Catherine was born. Her parents’ twenty-fourth child, Catherine lost a twin at birth. A younger sister after her died as well, making Catherine the youngest of a…
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A Christian Response to Ebola
I want to tell you a story—about St. Catherine. But let me preface my remarks by saying that the Bible calls every believer a “holy one,” or a “saint.” And because all are “set apart” and not just a select few, the Reformers—with their emphasis on the priesthood of all believers—sought to minimize the clergy/laity divide. So ever since the Protestant Reformation, which swept across Europe in the sixteenth century, those of us who inherited their legacy have tended to downplay canonized saints and their days. Sure, we know about St. Patrick and St. Nicholas and St. Valentine’s Days, and perhaps the Feast of Stephen (thanks to Good King W.),…
