CNA Staff, Aug 4, 2020 / 23:05 pm
In the latter half of 2019 and the first few months of 2020, Australia contended with massive, devastating bushfires that burned more than 45 millions of acres of land and directly killed 34 people, with an estimated 400 or more additional people killed due to smoke inhalation.
In March, like the rest of the world, states and cities in Australia enforced strict lockdowns in an effort to "flatten the curve" of the coronavirus pandemic, sending people into uncertain isolation and causing some to lose their jobs.
These "tumultuous upheavals, unprecedented in our lifetimes" are a large part of the reasons the Australian Catholic bishops have chosen mental health as their social justice focus of the upcoming year.
"We want to say clearly that mental ill-health is not a moral failure, the result of a lack of faith, or of weak will. Jesus himself was labelled mad and, like us, he suffered psychological distress," Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, wrote in the opening of the conference's 2020-2021 Social Justice Statement.