Faith leaders' year of pandemic: grief, solace, resilience

In a pandemic-wracked year, religious leaders and spiritual counselors across the U.S. ministered to the ill, fed the hungry, consoled the bereaved. Some did so while recovering from COVID-19 themselves or mourning the loss of their own family members and friends.

At times, they despaired. So many people got sick, so many died, and these faith leaders couldn’t hug the ailing and the grieving, or hold their hands.

For safety’s sake, their congregations were kept away from in-person services for months, but the need to minister to them only intensified.

Amid the grief and anxiety, these faith leaders showed resilience and found reasons for hope as they re-imagined their mission. Here are some of their reflections on a trying year.

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LOSSES

In the early weeks of the pandemic, the Rev. Joseph Dutan lost his father to the coronavirus. Days earlier Dutan's mentor and friend, 49-year-old Jorge Ortiz-Garay, had become the first Roman Catholic priest in the U.S. to die from COVID-19.

Dutan felt grief, fear, even doubt. He mourned his father while consoling the community of St. Brigid, a Catholic church in an area straddling Brooklyn and Queens that had among the highest infection rates in New York City. His grief, he said, made him better able to help others enduring similar pain.

“When they come in for a funeral Mass of a loved one ... I feel I can relate to them, I can cry with them,” Dutan said. “I comfort them and tell them: ‘Things are going to be all right. We’re not alone; we’re in this together.’”

In the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas said the pandemic’s toll has been particularly severe among the many older adults in his Valley Beth Shalom congregation.

He estimated that 25 to 50 of its roughly 5,000 members lost...