Bishop Paprocki: Catholic Church Can Provide a Clear Path for COVID-19 Response

Catholic principles of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life can aid society’s approach to pandemic, the Illinois bishop says in a recent essay.

By Judy Roberts, EWTN News, September 18, 2020

Judy Roberts Judy Roberts is a journalist who has worked for both the secular and Catholic press. In addition to the Register, she has written for Legatus Magazine, Franciscan Way and Our Sunday Visitor, and is a former religious books reviewer for Publishers Weekly. …

As the coronavirus shutdowns stretched into months, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, realized he was witnessing something extraordinary.

“I had never seen anything like this in my life,” he told Register correspondent Judy Roberts in an interview in mid-September.

What he observed caused the vice president of the Illinois Catholic Health Association to draw on his background in medical ethics and apply the standard of ordinary and extraordinary means of preserving life to evaluate the response to COVID-19.  …