By John Carpay
Interim writer, John Carpay, Law Matters
Those wrestling with the morality of lockdowns could benefit from the profound insights provided by Bishop John Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, a Notre Dame Law School professor, and vice-president of the Illinois Catholic Health Association. Bishop Paprocki notes that government officials give dire warning about a virus that can kill the body, while ignoring the numerous moral hazards of lockdown measures that harm the mind, soul and spirit. While politicians allow access to liquor, cannabis, and abortions, they restrict access to houses of worship and to religious practices, effectively declaring these to be non-essential.
Bishop Paprocki argues that our human life is a great gift, and also secondary to the eternal life of our immortal soul. While life is precious and valuable and should be protected, it is also passing. Declining extraordinary medical treatments is acceptable when the medical treatment has no significant expectation of success, or when its burdens outweigh its benefits, or when the medical treatment only prolongs suffering in the face of inevitable and approaching death, or when the medical treatment is too expensive and exhausts the always-limited resources that could be better used to save others.
In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II made the distinction between euthanasia and forgoing aggressive medical treatment. When Pope John Paul II was dying, he was not rushed to the hospital to be kept on life support indefinitely; instead he gave us a powerful example of how to die naturally.
Catholic medical ethics use the standard of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life. Normally one uses only ordinary means (according to circumstances of persons, places, times and cultures) without imposing a grave burden on oneself or another. A person may use extraordinary means, but only if he or she does not fail in some more serious duty.
Bishop Paprocki contends that if we are morally obligated to use extraordinary means to preserve life, then we should not even get into our cars, since there is a risk that we could be killed. But we do not stop driving, and there is no moral imperative to stop driving. Not driving would impose an extraordinary burden on everyday life, denying people the ability to attend to work, school, family and other obligations.
Even though children are not threatened by COVID, politicians close schools “because somebody could die.” But “somebody could die” cannot be our simple moral standard, as we now see with lockdown measures that make it illegal to spend time with friends in person, to hold the hand of a dying parent, and to enjoy fellowship with other believers in a house of worship.
Bishop Paprocki applies this principle of ordinary and extraordinary means to our societal response to COVID. He asserts that there is no moral obligation for governments to shut down society, require people to stay home, put employees out of work, send businesses into bankruptcy, impair the food supply, and prevent people from going to their house of worship. Therefore, the government should not impose these extraordinary means on society through coercive laws and health orders, because these extraordinary means impose burdens that outweigh benefits.
This thinking happens to align – roughly – with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which requires government to carefully weigh both the harms and the benefits of lockdown measures that violate our fundamental freedoms to move, travel, worship, invite friends and family to our homes, and peacefully assemble to express our opinions.
Sadly, our politicians are making no serious effort to investigate, analyze, measure or monitor the full extent of lockdown harms. I know this to be true because the Justice Centre’s researchers have spent hundreds of hours looking for, and asking for, government documents that would show that governments are proactively doing their due diligence when it comes to lockdown harms. Such documents do not exist. Instead of doing their homework, politicians assert confidently that lockdowns are saving many lives, while failing to provide actual evidence to support this claim.
Like our politicians, Canada’s Catholic bishops do not appear to recognize the manifold severe harms that lockdowns are inflicting on the spiritual, mental and physical well-being of millions of Canadians. On the contrary, the bishops support lockdowns as required by love of neighbour. This is more a platitude than an argument. Love of neighbour also includes allowing people to earn a living, see their family, and go to Church. Love of neighbour demands that we not place the elderly in solitary confinement, cut off from their own family members, in the name of “safety.”
I call on our bishops to take a hard and honest look at the many and severe harms that lockdowns are inflicting on Canadians, including the blatant and unjustified violations of our religious freedom.
