VE Day the perfect reason to reopen churches
Most organisations which are currently locked down by Covid-19 are lobbying vigorously for the restrictions to be lifted as soon as possible. It is rather melancholy that Church leaders do not seem to be among their number. The zeal of bishops to go further than the government regulations in keeping churches shut contrasts sadly with the wishes of parishioners.
There is much excellent local pastoral work going on, and plenty of services are livestreamed. But talk of “community” is somewhat empty without buildings where a community can gather. Last year, before the virus, the Church of England was strongly preaching the need for being physically together, rather than just online, for worship and fellowship; but now this doctrine has been laid aside. Of course public health matters, but why are church leaders so reluctant to find imaginative ways to open their doors? An unworthy thought crosses the mind: would they be keener on re-opening if, like so many workers, they had been furloughed for the duration?
Anyway, a chance for a rethink now offers itself. Friday week is the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Virtually every parish church in the land has a memorial, inside or out (and sometimes both) to those who fell in both world wars. Why not deck them out and invite people to come and pay their respects to them, with little displays, where possible, of short biographies of the dead? It would not be impossible, for just one day, to find volunteers to watch the monuments and ensure social distancing.
I say “deck them out” because VE Day, as its name suggests, is quite unlike Armistice Day. Whereas November 11 is solemn and commemorative, May 8 is joyful: it celebrates the victory of good over evil (let us “park”, for a moment, the debate about whether the victorious Stalin was any better than the defeated Hitler). No poppies then, but traditional symbols of triumph, such as laurel or bay, are what is needed – and something that celebrates May, the month of growth.
One wouldn’t want to push too hard, but could not the churches use the occasion to look forward to victory over Covid-19?
After all, on the original VE Day, we were still fighting Japan and so, Winston Churchill reminded the country, it was “a victory only half won”.
The relevant government
ministry is nowadays called the Department of Health and Social Care, but coronavirus has brought out once again that public policy is focused much more on the health bit than on the care bit.
In a sense, that is right: medical treatment is the most urgent thing of all. But there are at least three counter-points – the first professional, the second psychological, the third grimly practical.
The professional one is that the crisis has proved that the National Health Service does not regard care workers as quite the real thing. The confused chains of “commissioning” authority in local areas leave care homes at the mercy of administrative foul-up. In some places, some hospitals said at first that they could not admit anyone from care homes.
Others have sometimes sent back patients to the homes although they did not have the right tracheotic equipment to look after them. It has been known for a care home to have to lock its doors in order to force a hospital not to release a patient prematurely.
The psychological point: as its name suggests, a care home is a place that looks after people, rather than making them well and getting them out. Far more than in a hospital, nurses and carers come to know their residents, sometimes for years. Care homes are also small institutions, much more personal than most hospitals. They contain, say, 60 occupants rather than several hundred. It is not that they do not know how to deal with death, which is, after all, a central feature of their trade. It is rather that they are acutely affected by a big change in death rates.
The head of a leading care-home chain brings this home to me by pointing out that, in a normal April, his homes would expect a little over 400 people to die in their care. This April’s figure will be about 1,100. This is a tremendous shock to all involved, and a tremendous feeling of failure, even though it is scarcely their fault.
The practical point concerns financial viability. Right now, the normal care home pattern of death and replacement is broken. Many more than usual are dying. Many fewer than usual are coming in. Who, after all, would want to enter a care home at this point if it could be avoided? The bigger providers expect to start losing money by June unless the situation improves (which, to be fair, it most likely will). The single-home providers will be in trouble before that.
So much talk about “protecting the NHS”, perhaps, that we have exposed social care to unnecessary risk.
In his statement in Downing
Street yesterday, Boris Johnson’s first words were highly typical: “I’m sorry I’ve been away from my desk.” Within his apology was a sort of bravado. It reminded me of the tardy schoolboy whose late arrival in the classroom steals the show. Like all Boris tactics, it had that element of jesting on a serious subject, which repels the Roundhead in the British character and delights the Cavalier. Our Civil War never really ended.
read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion