Alfredo Verdoy. Jesuit priest. Professor of Church History in the Faculty of Theology at the Pontifical University of Comillas and Director of the Historical Archive of the Society of Jesus in Spain.
People who have been discharged from the Coronavirus testify that throughout their short and intense illness they went through the following stages: indignation and victimization; confrontation, acceptance of pain and disappointment; struggle without quarter, despite the feeling of exhaustion and even death, to defend their lives and, finally, slow and slow recovery of their vital signs.
Perhaps many of us, members of a society not generally accustomed to frustration and the struggle for life, find ourselves, in the midst of the quarantine we are living, in the stage of indignation and victimization. There is no point in remaining in it for long. Lamentations are of no use; they make us weaker, they disturb us, they make us sad and they sink us psychologically. We need, if we as a society are still bogged down in anger, to get out of everything that takes away from being fully human and from everything that destroys us internally.
We will come out when all of us, as individuals and as members of our society, ask ourselves the right questions, however crude and not entirely politically correct, and when we respond with the necessary courage, beyond false accusations, with the truth that frees us from past ties and opens up horizons of life and hope.
It will be these new horizons of life and hope, many of which are already being born and growing among us, that will help us to face everything that is happening to us without fear, without resentment and without envy. Strengthened, though still weakened and in need of all kinds of help, we will feel that nature, as long as we respect it and use it properly, will stop responding to us with aggressiveness, arrogance and excess; we will perceive that the whole of humanity needs to return to its point of origin, to its most glorious stages in which all men, from the smallest to the greatest, from the newly-born to the one who is saying goodbye to life, are necessary and we are dispensable and disposable; finally, we will be grateful that above us is the strength and the illusion of life that are born from the Creator of the world, that the only thing he aspires to is that his children live as true brothers and sisters and as beings of solidarity and not of indignation.
