19th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2021

How fortunate we have been in this South-West corner of Victoria to have been preserved safe from all contact with the Covid virus! So far, none of us has been its immediate victim; and few have had family members or friends from elsewhere brought low. Our major inconvenience has been each successive lockdown and its flow-on intrusions — which have been real, but infinitely preferable to the direct effects of the virus itself. I do not share the resentment felt apparently by a significant number of citizens whenever a new lockdown has been imposed by our political leaders and their professional medical advisors. I keep my annoyance for the vagaries of the virus itself, and the wilful, careless neglect of the lockdown rules by the few. Even a superficial comparison of the official responses to the recent crises in New South Wales and in Victoria, and their different outcomes, reassures me of the value of the clear, prompt and firm choice of lockdown.

Certainly, each successive lockdown has had its consequences, whether in the areas of financial hardship, nervous and mental stresses for young and old, medical treatment, schooling, appropriate and respectful celebration of funerals, weddings and family occasions — [and the list goes on]. Many of these effects could have been, and still can be, mitigated by timely financial and professional assistance provided by federal and State governments — a question primarily of political priorities. Again, the ultimate problem lies not necessarily with the lockdown, but with official response and the virulence and unpredictability of the virus.

Currently, individual citizens are being faced with the choice to opt for the available vaccinations or not. The choice is complicated by uncertainty about possible destructive longer-term side-effects of the vaccinations on certain individuals. How destructive and how likely are they in relation to the relatively certain outcome of the vaccinations? If enough people choose positively, the population as a whole will become safely immune from the otherwise inevitable outcomes. Do governments have the power to compel their citizens to be vaccinated, or to make vaccination a necessary condition for other needs such as employment, or hospitalisation? The question of choice introduces the need for moral responsibility — and the stakes are high.

Those of us who are Catholics are helped by the example of Pope Francis who has already publicly chosen to be vaccinated, and urged everyone to act similarly. In this he has himself been guided by the continuing development in the Church over the past fifty years of the science of Social Justice, in parallel to the spread in society generally of democratic governments and political freedoms. Individual political freedom is not an absolute right, even though it does spring from the fact that all human persons, made as they are in the image of God, have an equal and inviolable human dignity. To exercise individual human freedom requires that such freedom be granted equally to everyone else. Individual rights exist and thrive only within the context of the Common Good of everyone.

There is nothing new in this for followers of Jesus. Jesus was crystal clear in his insistence that we genuinely love each other, every other, going so far as to require that we love even our enemies. In the Kingdom of God, we are all brothers and sisters. Genuine freedom on our part means that we respect the similar freedom of everyone else. We cannot insist simply on our own rights while disregarding the radical and equal dignity of everyone. Jesus not only taught it — he lived it; and died for it.