New Book With A Catholic Perspective On The Pandemic Looks At The Church’s Future

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(REVIEW) One sure sign that the pandemic is fading may be the steady stream of books about it that have started to trickle out. It’s true that COVID-19 affected the planet like nothing else in our lifetimes. In fact, the fallout from what has transpired over the last 15 months could be felt for years, if not decades, to come.

How it affected the church, specifically Roman Catholicism, is of great importance to parishioners as well as societies around the world. That’s what a new book by journalist Philip Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, aims to explore. The book is detailed and exhaustive when it comes to the events of the last year. It also answers many of the questions Catholics, specifically those in the United States, may have now that virus is subsiding.

Were the lockdowns too draconian? Could government done things differently? How did both these affect the church and Catholicism going forward? Lawler’s book, “Why the Church Must Spread Hope, Not Fear, in a Pandemic” (published by Crisis Publications), is one of the first to closely examine how the pandemic affected the church.

Lawler’s book, whether you agree with his theory or not, is thought-provoking and not afraid to attack secular orthodoxies and narratives regarding public health and how its often adversarial relationship with religion led to the current situation the church finds itself in.

The 176-page book, a combination of reporting and research, argued that the lockdown message was “pounded by the media into our consciousness, encouraging us to live in isolation and to fear closeness with others, have produced the sort of dystopian environment that Thomas Hobbes sketched as the basis for his Leviathan: a society that sees human existence as a war of all against all, sees lives as ‘nasty, poor, brutish and short.’”

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New book with a Catholic perspective on the pandemic looks at the church’s future