Church

Quarantine of Quarantines

by Blake Billings, Ph.D.
- It seems we may be approaching the end of our quarantine. Yes, of course, the annual Lenten quarantine is soon to be complete. We have entered into Passiontide already, and Holy Week is upon us. But this spiritual construct has collided with its medical counterpart, many of us having to isolate over the past year in various ways and for varied durations. The notion of “quarantine” has held a significant place in medical history and in church history, and has taken on added significance during our year of pandemic. It has historically referred to isolations, penances, but also to indulgences. And this year, “quarantine” has been experienced universally, throughout the world and throughout the church.
- Quarantines Religious and Medical
  
  Our distancing and isolation has been imposed to an unprecedented global extent, now already enduring through two Lenten fasts. The obligation to take on the rigors of our global quarantining was not initially embraced. Philip Pullella, reporting for Reuters, wrote in March of last year that Catholics had “criticized a cardinal's order to close churches in Rome on Friday to help contain the spread of coronavirus and Pope Francis cautioned against ‘drastic measures.’ Some took to social media to rail against the move by Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, accusing him of caving in to the government. One said the move had put ‘Christ in quarantine.’” While these restrictive steps have by now become part of “the new normal,” their introduction was not easily received. Pullella related that Father Maurizio Mirilli, a pastor of a Roman parish, wrote, “My heart is in pieces. I have to close everything, even the church ... I feel like a father whose children have been snatched from him.” Nevertheless, the “quarantine” had begun, and Pope Francis was soon broadcasting daily Mass from the Santa Marta chapel in the Vatican, and parishes around the world were structuring their liturgical lives with an eye toward the medical profession and state regulation.
  
  Vatican News (April 2020) was soon pointing to precedent. One moment of note was October of 1576, when “the Court of Providence accepted Cardinal Borromeo's proposal and decreed a general quarantine for all the inhabitants of Milan. On October 18, the cardinal issued a similar edict for the secular and regular clergy, ordering ‘ecclesiastics to stay at home’, exempting only priests and religious who took care of the spiritual and material assistance of the population. The people of Milan in quarantine could not go to the church to pray or attend Mass. Saint Charles Borromeo made sure that the crossroads of the city were marked with crosses and altars, where Masses could be celebrated, with the faithful participating from far from their windows.”
  
  The ancient world certainly knew of isolating from disease, even if its science could not specify the precise source of contagion. Without specifying a forty-day duration, the practice of isolation is seen in the Book of Leviticus. Evidence of the practice thus goes back at least as far as the 8^th century BCE in Israel’s history, Leviticus requires the separation of those infected with the skin disease called tzaraath, associated with leprosy. This separation is linked more to theological than biological reasoning, as the illness like all others was associated with sinfulness, and it served as a kind of excommunication. “Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside the camp.” (Wikipedia)
  
  The Center for Disease Control tells us that the practice of quarantine “as we know it,” began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics. While the city of Dubrovnik is linked in the 14^th century to the first imposition of the practice as a 30-day isolation (trentine), Venice is credited with the term “quarantine.” “Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. This practice, called quarantine, was derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni which mean 40 days” (CDC). Venice built plague hospitals called “lazarettos,” the name reminiscent of the biblical Lazarus – connoting the miserable, poor beggar rather than the friend whom Jesus raised from the dead. The practice of isolation appears subsequently throughout medical history, making its way with Europeans to the western hemisphere. “In ports in North America, quarantine was introduced during the same decade that attempts were being made to control yellow fever, which first appeared in New York and Boston in 1688 and 1691, respectively. In some colonies, the fear of smallpox outbreaks, which coincided with the arrival of ships, induced health authorities to order mandatory home isolation of persons with smallpox, even though another controversial strategy, inoculation, was being used to protect against the disease…” In the United States, the late 19th century saw the introduction of federally-imposed quarantines in connection with waves of immigration and various disease outbreaks, such as yellow fever in 1878 and cholera in 1892.
  
  The precise medical reasoning for the forty-day period is not clear. Eugenia Tognotti, an Italian specialist in public health, says, “It is not known why 40 days was chosen as the length of isolation time needed to avoid contamination, but it may have derived from Hippocrates theories regarding acute illnesses. Another theory is that the number of days was connected to the Pythagorean theory of numbers. The number 4 had particular significance. Forty days was the period of the biblical travail of Jesus in the desert. Forty days were believed to represent the time necessary for dissipating the pestilential miasma from bodies and goods through the system of isolation, fumigation, and disinfection.” (“Lessons from the History of Quarantine, from Plague to Influenza A”)
- Lessons Theological and Spiritual
  
  If the medical history of quarantine leaves open the significance of the number forty, certainly our religious history is saturated by that figure. Daniel Gonzalez, in a blog post for the Archdiocese of Miami, lists some of its instantiations:
  
  The story of Noah tells of rain falling on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.
  
  Both Moses and Elijah fasted for 40 days before beginning their missions.
  
  The Hebrews wandered for 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt.
  
  It took Joshua’s spies 40 days to search out the promised land and bring back fruit.
  
  Goliath taunted the Israelite army in the morning and evening for 40 days.
  
  Jonah warned the Ninevites they had 40 days until God would overthrow the city.
  
  Jesus fasted and prayed in the desert for 40 days before beginning his ministry.
  
  This connection between the preventative and the penitential aspects of the forty days has opened the door for many spiritual lessons. Katie Bahr was reporting in “U.S. Catholic” last March on the pastoral teachings that soon were offered, noting Fr. Mark Peacock from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who posted on the need to fast from the Eucharist: “it’s sort of a blessing that this is happening during Lent, because it has challenged us in a whole new way… We all hunger for Christ in our life. We all hunger for holiness and faithfulness, and now we’re being challenged to do that in different ways… We need to pray better now than we ever have, because we need to pray for our government and those in leadership within the church.” And with some resignation, Fr. John Whitney of Seattle quoted his associate: “Sometimes you find Lent. And sometimes Lent finds you” (“Finding faith in a time of quarantine”).
  
  Bishop Robert Barron points to three lessons we can derive from our extended quarantine. First, he sees a rediscovery that we are “an intensely, inescapably Eucharistic Church.” When in-person attendance became restricted, “innumerable priests and bishops all over the country -- indeed, around the world -- commenced to live-stream or film the liturgy, broadcasting it over Facebook, YouTube, or on television.” Related to this Eucharistic character, his second insight is that “priests are in an intensely symbiotic relationship with their people.” While the monastery is not a parish, this phenomenon can be seen mirrored for Benedictine’s in the “cenobitic” aspect of community life, and here at Portsmouth in relations with the oblates, the School, and additional friends of the Abbey. These first two point to a broader ecclesiological lesson, “that the Church is stubbornly incarnational. At the heart of the Catholic sensibility is the conviction that God became flesh in Jesus Christ.” Whether less accessible in-person or experienced with masks, without singing, or at greater distances, the liturgical life and in fact all Christian life has been sorely tested, seemingly temporarily suspended in its fully incarnational dimension through the pandemic’s constraints.
  
  M. Craig Barnes, President of the Princeton Theological Seminary, has written on the lessons Saints Benedict and Gregory the Great can offer in our time of pandemic. Gregory, in particular, had to confront “a long, horrible time in Rome,” with a succession of violent invasions, widespread poverty, and the Plague of Justinian. “But it was also the century that gave us St. Benedict, who wrote the rule that still guides many monastic houses to this day.” Barnes notes the “daily rhythm of prayer, work, and the singing of the psalter – including the Psalms of Lament. Down through the centuries, and the succession of plagues to follow, the people took comfort in knowing that the monks were voicing their laments and petitions to God.” He praises the “fifteen hundred years of cloistered monks who brought the world’s laments before God…” And it was not only prayer that Gregory modeled for us. As Barnes notes, he “reluctantly left one of those monastic houses to become the Pope,” and from the authority of that position, which he consolidated, he also sold church property to feed the people of Rome as, Gregory himself said, “a contemplative condemned to action.” Barnes sees the Benedictine life as a movement “from humility in agitation to humility in gratitude,” perhaps drawing on the path of humility we see outlined in Chapter Seven of the Rule (See “From Humility to Humility | The Spirituality of Quarantine”).
  
  Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez of Los Angeles has offered these words of consolation, which are presented with a prayer to our Lady of Guadalupe, posted on the USCCB website: “With the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus, we are confronted once more with the fragility of our lives, and again we are reminded of our common humanity; that the peoples of this world are our brothers and sisters, that we are all one family under God. God does not abandon us. He goes with us even now in this time of trial and testing. In this moment, it is important for us to anchor our hearts in the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. Now is the time to intensify our prayers and sacrifices for the love of God and the love of our neighbor. Let us draw closer to one another in our love for him and rediscover the things that truly matter in our lives.”
- Penance and Indulgence
  
  While the quarantines of Lent connote the penitential, the language of the church prior to the 1960’s also associated “quarantines” and other periods of time with the granting of indulgences. Without delving into the intricacies of the theology behind this practice, we simply note that formulas frequently calculated by “years” and “quarantines” were associated with many grants. This language came to be modified after the Second Vatican Council in the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, the reduced compendium of indulgences developed in the 1960’s to replace the Raccolta, which had long served as the sourcebook explaining the extensive and complex range of indulgences. Paul VI, from teaching being developed at the time of the Second Vatican Council, published the “Apostolic Constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina” on January 1, 1967, simplifying the practice of calculating the value of indulgences and offering more direct pastoral explanations for their application. Notably, it eliminated the practice of complex (and lengthy!) temporal calculations, such as the common “seven years and seven quarantines” such as repeatedly recurs, for example, in Benedict XIV’s 1742 proclamation on the Medal of Saint Benedict.
  
  While the temporal designation of “quarantines” has disappeared from calculations of indulgences, the granting of indulgences remains firmly in place. On March 20 of last year, the Vatican announced that a Plenary Indulgence was being granted to those impacted in a variety of ways by the coronavirus:
  
  The Plenary Indulgence is granted to the faithful suffering from Coronavirus, who are subject to quarantine by order of the health authority in hospitals or in their own homes if, with a spirit detached from any sin, they unite spiritually through the media to the celebration of Holy Mass, the recitation of the Holy Rosary, to the pious practice of the Way of the Cross or other forms of devotion, or if at least they will recite the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and a pious invocation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, offering this trial in a spirit of faith in God and charity towards their brothers and sisters, with the will to fulfill the usual conditions (sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion and prayer according to the Holy Father's intentions), as soon as possible… Health care workers, family members and all those who, following the example of the Good Samaritan, exposing themselves to the risk of contagion, care for the sick of Coronavirus according to the words of the divine Redeemer: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15: 13), will obtain the same gift of the Plenary Indulgence under the same conditions… This Apostolic Penitentiary also willingly grants a Plenary Indulgence under the same conditions on the occasion of the current world epidemic, also to those faithful who offer a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, or Eucharistic adoration, or reading the Holy Scriptures for at least half an hour, or the recitation of the Holy Rosary, or the pious exercise of the Way of the Cross, or the recitation of the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, to implore from Almighty God the end of the epidemic, relief for those who are afflicted and eternal salvation for those whom the Lord has called to Himself (See the Decree).
  
  As the Church and the world hopefully nears the end of the “long and winding road” of the pandemic, and certainly as we arrive at the end of our Lenten quarantine, we may take solace in these and similar prayers. And we may find it helpful to reflect on the many lessons that continue to resonate through this “quarantine of quarantines,” recognizing that through this we, in fact, have been finding our own place history.