It is a fact that the great religions face a new challenge in the days of the pandemic we are going through and sometimes the reactions are spasmodic.
Religious leaders insist on endangering human life with faith at the same time as others are being disciplined in its urgency. coronavirus.
Still others convey messianic messages, considering the pandemic a harbinger of the Day of Judgment that is coming at full speed, or on the contrary attributing to it redemptive properties for the sins of mankind.
As for the faithful, they operate in a similar Manichaean way. Some see their faith waning, struggling with their conscience and the eternal "how did he leave God should something like this happen? ”, while others consider the global health crisis as a test of faith.
And the test is for sure, except that the one who is ultimately controlled is religion itself and the way it reacts to all the cataclysms that take place. And at the same time it is a test of logic, whether the religious leaders will help save human life or whether on the contrary they will endanger it in the name of faith.
One thing is certain, however, that another kind of battle is raging on the fringes - or even the front line sometimes - of the pandemic we live in: the rational demands of health care versus the traditional demands of discipline in the rituals of religious faith.
Social exclusion is required by health, the overcrowding of the faithful in places of worship the religious tradition. What principle should be followed?
The right way to react is not difficult to find, we are told every day by all the health institutions and doctors of the universe. And the same thing is said by many religious leaders and communities, from the first moments of the epidemic to the end of February.
The Catholic Church, for example, responded decisively to the deadly outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy by banning all ecclesiastical services from the beginning of March.
Then the Pope Francis operated in an impressively empty Agios Petros, where you would normally see hordes of believers in the square outside the basilica. He even called on the governments of the world to put "the people first" and to take all necessary measures for the "viral genocide", as he characterized it.
He now delivers his Sunday message via the internet and invites his priests to give the divine communion at home to the faithful.
Her religious authorities did the same Saudi Arabia, who usually react irrationally fatalistically to such trials of faith. As early as the beginning of March, the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina were closed, which are flooded throughout the year by thousands of pilgrims.
Again, images from the empty Kaaba, the holiest site of Islam, have made the rounds of the internet in a positive way. Showing that something unprecedented is happening. And then in a number of Muslim nations mass prayers began to be banned. In Kuwait they even changed the call from the loudspeakers of the mosques: from "come and pray" to the faithful they now say "pray in your homes".
Something similar happened in the hard-core circles of the Orthodox Jews. Most rabbis closed the synagogues for the faithful and reminded their flock that the Torah clearly wrote that "the obligation to protect the sanctity of life exceeds all other obligations." This is exactly what the chief rabbi of England repeated to the faithful.
At India today most Hindu temples are closed. And at the same time in Thailand many Buddhist monks make masks out of recycled plastic.
Unfortunately, not all religious leaders and communities have followed the same line against the pandemic. Some even go so far as to question what is tragically happening in the world in the name of faith…
One name that unfortunately stands out in the "alternative" approach to the pandemic is the pastor of one of Florida's largest evangelical communities. Rodney Howard-Browne defied state orders for social exclusion, calling his church "the safest place." He was finally arrested on March 30.
Several more pastors at USA they went their own way, having bigger or smaller problems with the Authorities. Another Christian religious leader who defies the coronavirus is Majdi Allawi, leader of the Lebanese Maronites (who belong to the Eastern doctrine of Roman Catholicism), who denies all means of personal protection on the grounds that "Jesus is my protection." It is my antiseptic ".
And some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities are also dangerously reckless. The Hashemite community of Bucklin disregarded the restrictive measures and gathered in places of worship for rituals, weddings and funerals, while New York rolled down in March.
Most of these communities soon showed high rates of coronavirus infection. Something similar happened in Israel, with some ultra-Orthodox leaders defying government measures to close places of worship and rabbinical schools, insisting that "canceling the Torah study is more dangerous than coronavirus».
The result; Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up less than 10% of the country’s population, now account for half of all hospitalized cases of Covid-19.
But also in the Muslim world we encounter catastrophically naive reactions to the pandemic. The most notorious case was that of the large Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni apostolic movement based in India with more than 80 million members worldwide.
Despite the warnings, they performed their Islamic rites regularly in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and New Delhi, India. Science has ranked them as the No. 1 culprit for the spread of the pandemic in South and Southeast Asia.
Something similar happened, of course, with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints South Korea, the recklessness of the faithful which was one of the most important reasons for the spread of the coronavirus in the country.
At a time when the majority of the Sunni and Shiite Muslim worlds reacted with secular sobriety to state restrictions, the most dogmatic among them acted as "super-carriers" of the virus.
In Iran, say, one of the countries most terribly affected by the coronavirus, when the authorities finally banned gatherings in temples, the faithful reacted by violating the blockade, rushing violently into places of worship.
We have unfortunately seen similar images in Pakistan, where most priests have refused to restrict the gatherings in the mosques. In Karachi and elsewhere, worshipers pelted police with stones as they tried to disperse crowds for Friday's service.
In Britain now, where conservative Muslim leaders have also reacted violently to the closure of mosques, they have even issued a fatwa against government directives on March 17, saying more or less that "the protection of the faith goes beyond the protection of the self."
Fortunately, other muftis and scholars of Islam responded here, reminding that Islam nowhere says that "believers risk their lives for the sake of prayer."
As for our country, the situation prevails with the many times the dimension of its decisions Holy Synod and a portion of priests and no further analysis is needed.
We also watch them in the daily news…
All religious leaders who favor the religious tradition of human life have one thing in common, no matter what their faith is: they prioritize the subjective translation of their faith over the objective demands of science, reason, and ultimately health.
According to the rhetoric they unleash, they firmly believe that despite the fact that something very dangerous is happening in the world, God, whoever God is here, will intervene and save them by showing his merciful nature.
"Praying to God is the only way into this ordeal," an Islamist cleric told Egypt, a proposition that could, however, have come out of the mouth of any priest of any major religious tradition.
And at the same time, blind faith goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories of divine origin. God threw the pandemic on specific groups of people. To whom; Depending on who you ask.
To "homosexuals and ecologists," an American evangelical pastor (Ralph Drollinger) told us. In "Adultery", a Turkish professor of sociology and his scholar Islam (Bedri Gencer).
To the "Chinese", said so many Muslim priests around the world (and primarily the religious leader Hadi Al-Modarresi of Baghdad). To the "Jews", says an anti-Semitic pastor from Florida and an imam in Gaza. And he goes on to say, alas.
But again, fortunately for all of us, these are the exceptions…