ABIDJAN, APRIL 17, 2020 (CISA) – “The pandemic we are going through has to some extent restored nature to its rights: the universe is breathing again without the men who attacked it yesterday disappearing from the surface of the earth! Today, families find themselves forced to create common activities! Believers, for want of being able to find themselves in their usual places of worship, have become inventive, generous and more responsible in prayer! Our states, even the most powerful, are forced to admit their limits! Men and women, whether rich or poor, realize their finitude and the vanity of many things, because all are housed in the same boat in the face of relentless death,” Jean Pierre Cardinal Kutwã, Archbishop of Abidjan said in his April 12 Easter Sunday Homily.
The Cardinal noted that this pandemic implies a return to the first sense in the realization of our vocation as human beings created in the image of God and called to his likeness.
“While our world lives constrained by the restrictive measures that the Covid-19 imposes on us, the text of the announcement of Easter that we hear at each Easter vigil… translates well in my opinion, the times in which we are since the coronavirus epidemic became a pandemic, a pandemic which, like death, will never have the last word on the history of men, because Christ is and will always be victorious over death,” he said.
He noted that after the pandemic is over and the world has realized new and better ways of existing we are called to not go back to the old ways of selfishness and unnecessary power struggles.
“And when it is gone, what will be left for us? To resume the paths of our lives as in the past? As if nothing had happened? To further erect barriers between us, to raise higher the walls of distrust, of slander and withdrawal of each on oneself? Let lies and hatred triumph? To continue to swell with pride where a simple virus has reduced us all to confinement, to silence?” he asked.
“Are we going to continue to look at our health infrastructures, to name just a few, in the state they are in? Shall we continue to think again and again: to have, to be able, and to be powerful? Will the outbursts of generosity and sacrifice that support the gifts we are witnessing at this time continue to provide daily well-being for our brothers and sisters? Yes this pandemic will certainly pass, it which invites us to new behaviors,” he said.
He urged that from now on, we must be active, review the scale of our individual and personal, community and national values and accept to let ourselves be challenged by this world that God offers us all.
