Author

Duncan MacLaren KCSG

Adjunct Professor
Australian Catholic University

For many of us, the worst part of the coronavirus crisis is the social distancing that is required to stop the spread.

It means that grandparents are separated from grandchildren; that people in love cannot touch one another; that all spots where people socialise have to be closed, including churches, schools, theatres, pubs and bingo halls; that we do a version of the dance of death around supermarkets trying to stock up while avoiding other shoppers. Timothy Radcliffe OP, the former Master of the Dominicans, described touch as “the nourishment of our humanity” yet it has become now the possible passing on of a deadly virus.

It is a virus which has the ability to undermine our very humanity given that we are radically relational, caught up in a web of obligations to others, summed up in the term derived from Catholic Social Teaching, ‘the common good’. The South African theologian, Albert Nolan, says that struggling for the common good is actually fulfilling the will of God since it is ‘whatever is best for the whole human family or the whole community of living beings or the whole universe in its grand unfolding. We are not isolated individuals. We are parts of a greater whole and it is the whole that determines the very existence of the parts’.

Read the full reflection above.

About the author

Dr Duncan MacLaren is the former Director of SCIAF, the Scottish Caritas, and was Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis from 1999-2007. He is an Adjunct Professor of Australian Catholic University where he introduced and taught a degree in international development studies. He is Chair of SCIAF’s Integral Human Development sub-committee and a member of the SCIAF Board as well as a member of the Theologians’ Committee of Caritas Europa. He recently graduated as a Doctor in theology and development at the University of Glasgow.