Welcome to Wednesday. Many experts and advocates warn that disabled people and communities of color in the U.S. are already being left out of the early vaccine rollout, even though the virus has disproportionately harmed them. An NCR columnist says that with so much talk about the decline of the U.S. bishops' conference in respectability, perhaps our bishops should model themselves after the pastoral leadership of St. Óscar Romero.

Jumping to the front of the vaccine line?

Dr. Diana Cejas still gets nightmares about her stint on a ventilator, years after she survived cancer and a stroke. The idea of going through that again as a COVID-19 patient terrified her.

So when she got her final dose of the COVID-19 vaccine Jan. 14, Cejas said it felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

"Part of me just wants to run around and be like ... 'Give this person the vaccine!' " said Cejas, a pediatric neurologist who works at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. "We should be giving this on the street corner at this point. Because if it can keep someone else from getting that sick, I don't see why we can't be getting it to the people that need it the most."

But Cejas and many other experts and advocates warn that disabled people and communities of color in the U.S. are already being left out of the early vaccine rollout, even though the virus has disproportionately harmed them.

Only about 8% of the population has had even one shot of the vaccine, and accurate data on vaccination by race or disability is scarce. The vaccine is also largely restricted to groups like health care workers, the elderly, and those deemed essential workers, such as teachers and grocery store workers.

You can read more of the story here.

More background:

• Because the vast majority of women religious in the United States are over the age of 70 and many live in large groups in close quarters, when sisters will get the coronavirus vaccine may be a matter of life and death. But the timing of their vaccinations depends on where they live.
   
• The Vatican's coronavirus commission and the Pontifical Academy for Life issued a joint statement calling for a coordinated international effort to ensure the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide.

US bishops could learn a lot from St. Óscar Romero

What the Catholic Church in the United States needs today, says NCR columnist Franciscan Fr. Daniel Horan, are more bishops like St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop from El Salvador, who was murdered by right-wing militants while celebrating the Eucharist in 1980.

"Enough ink has been spilled in this publication and others about the continual decline of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in respectability and its growing loss of moral authority," Horan writes. "There is plenty of commentary about how the bishops' conference has so intertwined itself in the partisan politics resulting from a kind of Faustian bargain it made in recent decades with the political right — ostensibly for the sake of judicial appointments and anti-abortion policies — such that, as a collective body, it has little moral ground to stand on and appears rudderless in the sea of crises facing society and the church today."

Horan goes on to say that he isn't interested in focusing more attention on those bad actors, but instead wants to turn an eye toward more effective models of pastoral leadership, such as Romero.

"The tenor of Romero's message is one that is in stark opposition to the lies and delusions of clericalism, which continues to be such an evil in the church today," Horan writes.

You can read more of Horan's column here.

More background:

• NCR's editorial calls for a Vatican investigation into the U.S. bishops' conference, writing that "the past four years have revealed that the U.S. bishops' conference is a group unable to represent the full range of Catholic teaching and unfit to act in the name of American Catholics."

More headlines

• During the final days of the 2020 presidential contest, Donald Trump singled out a group of sisters at a rally in Michigan. Yet it turns out that the much photographed five nuns in full habit, some holding Trump campaign signs, aren't nuns at all. 
   
• At Earthbeat, a new church network is calling attention to the relationship of the people of the countries of Asia and the Pacific with the ocean, forests and rivers, and the climate on which they all depend.

Final thoughts

In today's column, NCR political columnist Michael Sean Winters writes that it is time for Republicans to choose whether they will follow the Constitution, or Donald Trump. "No matter what Trump did that they liked, no matter the tax cuts and the judges and the tough stance against China, standing by Trump means coddling white supremacists and other domestic terrorists," he writes. Sign up for the Distinctly Catholic list to get Winters' columns in your email.

Until Thursday,

Stephanie Yeagle
NCR Managing Editor
[email protected]
Twitter: @ncrSLY

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