The Vatican complains of the "massacre of the elderly" due to COVID

After the "massacre of the elderly" due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vatican is asking the world to rethink the way it takes care of the elderly. "On all continents, the pandemic has mainly affected the elderly," Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said Tuesday. “The death toll is brutal in their cruelty. To date there is talk of over two million and three hundred thousand elderly people who have died from COVID-19, the majority of whom were over 75 years old ”, he added, defining it as a“ real massacre of the elderly ”. Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, spoke at a presentation of the document Old age: our future. The elderly after the pandemic. Most of the elderly who died of the coronavirus, Paglia said, have been infected in care institutions. Data from some countries, including Italy, show that at least half of the elderly victims of COVID-19 lived in residential institutions and nursing homes. Research from Tel Aviv University highlighted the direct proportional relationship between the number of beds in nursing homes and the number of deaths of elderly people in Europe, Paglia said, noting that in each country studied, the greater the number of beds. in nursing homes, the greater the number of elderly victims.

The French Fr Bruno-Marie Duffè, Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said that the health emergency has shown that those who no longer participate in economic production processes are no longer considered a priority. In the context of the pandemic, he said, "we take care of them after the others, after the 'productive' people, even if they are more fragile". The priest said that another consequence of not making the elderly a priority is the "breaking of the bond" between generations caused by the epidemic, with little or no solution proposed so far by those who make the decisions. The fact that children and young people cannot meet their elders, said Duffè, leads to "real psychological disturbances" for both young people and the elderly, who without being able to see each other could "die of another virus: pain ". The document released on Tuesday argues that the elderly have a "prophetic role" and that putting them aside for "purely productive reasons causes an incalculable impoverishment, an unforgivable loss of wisdom and humanity". "This view is not an abstract utopian or naive claim," the document states. “It can instead create and nurture new and wiser public health policies and original proposals for a welfare system for the elderly. More effective, as well as more humane. "

The model that the Vatican calls for requires an ethics that gives priority to the public good, as well as respect for the dignity of every person, without distinction. "All civil society, the Church and the various religious traditions, the world of culture, school, voluntary work, entertainment, manufacturing classes and classic and modern social communications, must feel the responsibility to suggest and support - in this Copernican revolution - new and targeted measures that allow the elderly to stay in the houses they know and in any case in family environments that look more like a home than a hospital ”, reads the document. The 10-page document notes that the pandemic has brought a double awareness: on the one hand, there is an interdependence between everyone, and on the other, many inequalities. Taking up the analogy of Pope Francis from March 2020, the document argues that the pandemic has shown that "we are all in the same boat", while arguing that "we are all in the same storm, but it is increasingly evident that we are in different boats and that less navigable boats sink every day. It is essential to rethink the development model of the entire planet “.

The document calls for a reform of the health system and urges families to try to satisfy the desire of the elderly who ask to stay in their homes, surrounded by their loved ones and their belongings when possible. The document recognizes that sometimes the institutionalization of the elderly is the only resource available to families, and that there are many centers, both private and public, and even some run by the Catholic Church, that provide human care. However, when proposed as the only viable solution to care for the vulnerable, this practice can also manifest a lack of concern for the weak. "Isolating the elderly is an obvious manifestation of what Pope Francis called the 'throwaway culture'," the document states. "The risks that afflict old age, such as loneliness, disorientation and the consequent confusion, loss of memory and identity, cognitive decline, often appear even more evident in these contexts, while instead the vocation of these institutions should be the family, social and spiritual accompaniment of the elderly, in full respect of their dignity, on a journey often marked by suffering ”, he continues. The academy underlines that the elimination of the elderly from the life of the family and of society represents "the expression of a perverse process in which there is no longer gratuitousness, generosity, that wealth of feelings that make life not only a giving and that is, to have not just a market. "Eliminating the elderly is a curse that this society of ours often falls upon itself," he says.