The emptying of the holy water stoups
That rather absurd novel The Betrothed, a literary high point of the 19th-century Romantic movement, has a couple of chapters that are more than ordinarily interesting at the moment, since they focus on the plague.
Alessandro Manzoni, who published the first version of I promessi sposi in 1827, based those chapters on accounts of the bubonic plague that killed 60,000, nearly half the population of Milan, in 1629-31.
The book was a favourite of the present Pope, whose family in Argentina came from northern Italy. He has read it at least three times, and elements of the scenes of the plague might have found a place in his metaphor of a field hospital for the universal Church.
Manzoni’s chapters are broad-brush: the city of Milan locked within its walls, the infected houses nailed up or with crosses on the door, the ghastly plague carts overflowing with corpses, the monatti who drove the carts and drank toasts to the plague. The hero, Renzo, witnesses all this and seeks Lucia, to whom he is betrothed, though they are separated by events. Thanks to the selfless Franciscan, Fra Cristoforo, he finds her in the lazaretto, among 16,000 infected and recovering.
The friar knows he is risking death by looking after the bodily and spiritual needs of the adults and orphans under his care. By not disguising his anger at Renzo’s intention of usurping God’s role as just judge, he wins him over to forgive his worst enemy.
His fellow friar, Father Felix, addresses survivors of the plague there. “For myself,” he says, “and for all my companions, who have been chosen to the high privilege of serving Christ in you, I humbly ask your forgiveness if we have not worthily fulfilled so great a ministry.”
Such was the sort of brave service that holy priests have in reality given. John Henry Newman, whose preference was for bookish retirement, gave himself to aid the poor in Birmingham during an epidemic of cholera, at a time when its transmission was not very well understood.
The trouble now is that epidemiology is all too knowing. At least it recognises its known unknowns. There is, though, a danger of leaving God out of the equation.
Naturally, epidemics run by aetiological laws. But for any individual (who after all is bound to die one day), the lottery of life is in the hands of Providence. Disease goes by scientific secondary causes, whether or not they are discernible. God is the first cause of all things, the ordainer of the lottery, who, by being able to do whatever he wants, can put right the unjust bungling of human endeavours. Anyway, the more serious stage of the coronavirus outbreak is likely to see holy water stoups in churches emptied, and on Good Friday people refraining from kissing the cross. These sacramentals can easily be made up for. If things get really bad, locally, the celebration of Mass for the public will be suspended. What then? Will we listen out for the sound of the sacring bell and do our worship outside locked churches?
I have, next to my umbrella stand, the phone number for a priest if I am mortally stricken. I can see that it would not do if I invited a Fra Cristoforo to give me the last rites only for him to spread the disease to others. Perhaps I could crawl to a well-ventilated street corner. That’s where mobiles come in handy. But this is to catastrophise. There are so many unsuspected variables in life that, once we’ve set things in order, we’d better leave it to a higher power to arrange the details of the hour of our death.