26 deaths in 3 US convents, as nuns confront the pandemic

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Mike Householder and David Crary, Associated Press
Updated 11:05 pm CDT, Friday, July 24, 2020

LIVONIA, Michigan (AP) — At a convent near Detroit, 13 nuns have died of COVID-19. The toll is seven at a center for Maryknoll sisters in New York, and six at a Wisconsin convent that serves nuns with fading memories.

Each community perseveres, though strict social-distancing rules have made communal solidarity a challenge as the losses are mourned.

Only small, private funeral services were permitted as the death toll mounted in April and May at the Felician Sisters convent in Livonia, Michigan — a spiritual hardship for the surviving nuns.

“The yearnings, throughout the pandemic, were to be with our dying sisters and hold our traditional services, funeral Mass and burial, to comfort each other,” said Sister Mary Christopher Moore, a leader of the Felician Sisters of North America.


Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/article/26-deaths-in-3-US-convents-as-nuns-confront-the-15432595.php

[BadGimp]

1. They're Killing Nuns YO!!!!

Nuns, what's next children?

[pazzyanne]

2. Well, they are mandating opening schools without a plan.

[tanyev]

4. Here in TX, religious schools got an exemption from the requirement to delay in person schooling.

I can't begin to fathom why they and the GOP would want that. "Let's voluntarily kill off our children and ourselves before everybody else!"

[wnylib]

3. I'm surprised there are still convents left.

This reminds me of a book on the14th century Plague that I read. It described whole convents and monasteries being decimated as the Plague spread through them.

[CTyankee]

5. Actually, according to some historians it resulted in the spread of humanistic thought and

what we now call the Renaissance. One third of the pristine population of what we now call Italy was wiped out.

[wnylib]

6. The book I was referring to was written

by a well-known historian, Barbara Tuchman. It's A Distant Mirror. It covers all of the 14th century, but gives a lot of detailed attention to the 1348 initial outbreak of the Plague.

She used mostly primary sources in the book, but did mention other historians and scholars on the topic. She did agree, for the most part, with your estimate of the total deaths in Europe. It's a while since I read it, but I believe the figure she gave was a range, from 25% to 30% overall, but higher in some locations and lower in others.

One quote of hers sticks on my mind for the way it illustrates how the people must have felt. It's from a monk who was the last survivor of his monastery, after nursing the others until they died. This is not verbatim since I don't have the book at hand, but he wrote that he continued to record events in case "sny of the race of man" survives to look back on the times from the future. The record ends mid sentence, when presumably he was too ill to continue and died also.

I think the Crusades were more instrumental than the Plague in the start of the Renaissance. But the Plague did play a large role in weakening the central power of the church. When it was clear that the church had no special intervention power with God to end the Plague, people turned to the flagellants with their emphasis on by-passing the clergy to directly appeal to God themselves. Old pre-Christian religious practices (wicca) increased as people hedged their religious bets.

Learning suffered as professors and monks died and qualified replacements were hard to find. Some universities closed for a while.

[CTyankee]

7. I love Barbara Tuchman. I should get her "A Distant Mirror."

I actually might have read it. I went on a reading spree about this subject, but only as an art historian. That "estimate"was the estimate in those books, not my own.

Art historians pretty much agree that the Black Death directly caused the Renaissance to happen in philosophy and in art.

[wnylib]

8. Wasn't Renaissance philosophy influenced

by knowledge that the Muslim world had preserved from ancient Greek and eastern Roman Empire writings that had been lost to the Western Empire? Crusaders were exposed to Muslim learning as well as cloth and spices that Arabic traders obtained from India. Several crusaders were European nobility (and some royals, like Richard the Lionhearted) who arranged with Mediterranean merchants (mostly Italians, I think) to trade in those items. The importing of written works from ancient civilizations besides the Greeks, caused a rebirth (Renaissance) of ancient literature and knowledge. I think that preceded the first outbteak of Plague in Europe in 1348.

The Plague's contribution to weakening centralized church power helped the ancient works to gain acceptance, but I think the works were first intoduced to Europe as a result of exposure to them during Crusades prior to 1348.

[CTyankee]

9. My research was focused more on what the impact of the plague was on Italy. When the plague

struck it caused trade to stagnate and businesses failed. Unemployment rose. But the drastic decline in the labor force caused wages to rise for both agricultural and urban workers, so that survivors of the Black Death generally had a higher standard of living than before the plague.

I think you are right about the exposure of Italians to works of the Muslim world prior to the plague, but religious topics and secular topics were explored outside of Muslim culture since that religion would not allow it. Both secular and religious themed art flourished, as seen in works by Giotto and Botticelli. The high death rate changed society as laborers became merchants and merchants became the new nobility. And there was a growing individualism in italian society due to the high death rate and the resulting value of human capital.

This was great for the artists and we can see what happened. The late, great art historians Frederick Hartt and Guido Ruggiero are great resources for deeper dives into this history. I know this is a bit off topic for your thesis (which I do not doubt).