This was shared today on a Facebook forum in which I am a participant. The post is from a Board Certified Chaplain whose job it is to be in hospitals, to visit, comfort, and serve patients within the institution and their families. I have her permission to reprint because she wants desperately for people to fully comprehend what workers are experiencing with forthright transparency. While people with power and clout cram the media circuits with promises, projections, and their posturing, those whose work deals directly, hands-on, with the people of this country (the precious electorate who needs to be “won over” for the vote) – THEY tell a story different from that of many a politician…
“Yesterday, around this alleged land of abundance and greatness, very sober Board Certified Chaplains have begun the task of sitting down with their Hospital Ethics Committees. In Catholic Healthcare Systems, this will be done in collaboration with the ordinary, aka bishop.
They and their Ethics Committees are under immense stress and angst, undescribable, emotional/existential/spiritual. Not only have they too been working around the clock to support patients and families, administrators have finally realized that our role is to support staff as well (never before have they been willing to acknowledge or support this critical care). They/we are at points of meltdown.
And now they are preparing to make the life and death decisions that will decide who receives the limited COVID-19 resources that are available nationwide. We are here. We are preparing to do what Italy has done; decide who lives and dies, because of the foolishness of this administration.
This is no longer the time to discuss the foolishness or wring our hands on Facebook. This is the time when we mortal beings are being forced to make Divine choices, which we should never have to do.
Every one of us, and our medical colleagues need your non-stop support and prayer to help us and our medical teams survive this. All of us will have Moral Injury and PTSD, some of us already do.
We cannot do this without all of you lifting us up to the Trinity for strength and support, and all of us praying for the forgiveness we need for having foolishly been complicit enough to get us here.
Vatican II charged every one of us with being priest, prophet and king. Every one us of us must rise to the task of being prophets going forward, no matter who in our churches, families, and communities will seek to kill us for it. Complacency kills. If we do not stand together in prayer, we will die in prayer, long before we should.
PLEASE hold us in nonstop prayer as we agonize. PLEASE”.
It is critical to be able to think, reason, and summon the empathy now more than ever for those workers who dedicate their lives with principle to doing their best job, despite these conflicting circumstances and the lack of transparency from leaders who have fallen far short of their own oaths of office. Without the individual workers on the ground, caring for the thousands of people, no amount of profit over people will erase the truth we need to see.
