God is always with his People and accompanies and consoles them in every crisis.  Here in Australia Catholic hospitals have rightly joined the government’s effort for the whole health system, government and non-government, to confront the menace.  Some thousands more beds are available for patients. Bishops as Chief Priests have to be at the head of the flock at this time.  The virus took society by surprise and Church leaders did not have the chance to elaborate policy beforehand and to call parish communities together to prepare for the difficulties ahead.   Like society at large Church activities have largely shifted to the net.   Thus prayer, meditation and educational programs can transfer well to social media.  Charity and help for the most vulnerable can be organised efficiently on the net so that no one is abandoned or goes without. For Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne this crisis is a call for us to commit ourselves more deeply to the Church’s mission to evangelise.  For years the Church had sought ways to reach out to families.   Now parents are cast into the front line in the education and instruction of their children.  Modern communication media are a golden opportunity…

    As a seventy-seven- year old I am at high-risk from the Corona virus.  I would like to share some scattered reflections from my pastoral experience as a priest-moral theologian. Epidemics since antiquity have always spread along trade routes with even more swiftly and dramatically in an age of globalization.  Despite the devastation, humanity has learned to overcome and not to succumb.  When the Black Death stuck in 1349 it took nearly half of Sienna’s population, leaving the walls of its new cathedral standing ‘in mid-air”.  Today, still unfinished, they have been absorbed as part of the cathedral’s history.  Since the Spanish flu just after World War I four great influenza epidemics have swept the world.   By the 1970ies scientists had vaccines for many extremely contagious diseases and predicted that epidemics might be consigned to the past.  They were quickly disillusioned by the arrival of AIDS, Ebola, Saas and now the Corona virus.  In fact, specialists kept warning that a tremendous outbreak was not just possible but highly likely and that we were medically and psychologically unprepared. A remarkable fact emerged from the Ebola epidemic in North Africa in the 1990ies.  Cultural anthropologists discovered that a tribe had escaped…