Ebola in the DRC: over 2,500 dead, and those who heal are struck down

Since May, an Ebola outbreak has ravaged the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United Nations coordinator for the response has warned that it is now advancing « exponentially », faster and farther than ever: more than 2,500 dead and more than 5,000 recorded cases. It is the seventeenth outbreak the country has known, and already the deadliest in its history, caused by a strain of the virus known as Bundibugyo, against which there exists to this day neither vaccine nor approved treatment.

The disease is spreading across a territory larger than France. Between 70 and 80 % of new cases have no known link to an already-recorded patient: the virus circulates unchecked. The available funds could be exhausted within weeks. And to the disease is added the hand of man: more than 260 attacks on healthcare workers in six months, eight killed, more than 160 infected, 43 dead. Some, in a region gnawed by three decades of war, hold the epidemic to be a lie and rise up against the measures that keep them from burying their dead. « All of this is happening in a region that has known three decades of conflict and that generates immense humanitarian needs, » the coordinator summed up.

The Church has always looked upon the plague without turning away her eyes, because she knows two things the age forgets. The first: the life of one’s neighbour is sacred, and to raise a hand against the one who heals is to shed the blood of the innocent, which the fifth commandment forbids under pain of damnation. The second: to tend the sick and to bury the dead are not favours but works of mercy that bind in conscience. « Sick, and you visited me, » the Judge will say on the last day; and old Tobias raised up the abandoned corpses when all men fled them.

By this measure, the acts judge themselves. To strike and kill those who come to heal is not a riot: it is homicide. To leave the dying without help when one has the means to help them is not a budgetary fate: it is a failure of charity, which binds the strong toward the weak. And the scourge itself the Church has never held for a mere biological chance: she has read in it a call to penance, and against it she has armed not wrath but prayer, singing for centuries: « From plague, famine and war, deliver us, O Lord. » Not fury against the one who heals, but the knee to the ground and the hand held out to one’s brother.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment and the works of mercy; Gospel according to St Matthew, XXV, 36; Book of Tobias (the burial of the dead); the Litany of the Saints, « A peste, fame et bello, libera nos, Domine. »