Angelus News | January 15, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 1

And it wasn’t just the nurses who acted selflessly. Another
blessing easy to miss was that most of us cared about one another.
Despite the blizzard of media reports about pandemic
crazies who refused to believe it was real or who refused to
wear masks, most of us, most of the time, were trying to do
the right thing.
We tried to take seriously the safeguards that were intended
not only to save us but to save others. The pandemic exposed
the selfishness of some, but it also affirmed that many more
of us are guided by an altruism that characterizes humanity
at its best.
I consider it a blessing that in the first months of the
pandemic I recovered the sounds of silence. Traffic was
minimal. Air pollution levels dropped. We walked in our
neighborhoods instead of driving to work. I started noticing
bird songs. When I took breaks from working at the dining
room table (my new office), I fed the mourning doves and
cardinals who were my only regular visitors.
Judging from the profits of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, I’m not
sure how many of us supported our struggling local shopkeepers,
but a lot of us tried to help the hardy entrepreneurs
who make up the backbone of our communities. Many of
us also donated a lot more to caring services as well, grateful
that we had jobs and income. In 2020, need was not something
far away. It was all around us.
This notion of community as something real and tangible
may be a blessing we all share in 2021. In 2020, I found
myself walking more and greeting people more readily. If
our public culture as embodied by social media was degenerating
to the howl of the mob, my neighborhood culture
became, well, more neighborly.
Our Church had a rough go of it in 2020, with closures
and lawsuits and the McCarrick report, but we had blessings,
too. Pope Francis’ remarkable “urbi et orbi” in Rome at
the height of the first wave of the pandemic was perhaps the
most visually striking moment of his papacy.
The livestreamed rosaries and Masses united us not just
with our parish but with Catholics from around the world. I
found the international audience attracted to the livestreamed
Masses of Bishop Robert Barron to be as inspiring
as his homilies.
Even our pang of hunger for the Eucharist was a blessing,
I believe. Surveys may suggest that many Catholics see the
Eucharist as a symbol, but the hunger we felt was for more
than a mere symbol. The challenge we face in 2021 will be
to return to church and accustom ourselves once again to
Mass as a community.
This was a most extraordinary year: painful and yet not
without rewards. I don’t think I will recover my “old normal”
for a long time, if ever. I do hope my “new normal” contains
some of the blessings unexpectedly found in 2020.
Greg Erlandson is the president and editor-in-chief of Catholic
News Service.
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