Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, won a first place award in the 2021 Catholic Press Awards sponsored by the Catholic Media Association of the United States and Canada, for an essay that he wrote on how the coronavirus pandemic revealed health care inequities impacting people of color, the elderly and the poor.
Then-Archbishop Gregory’s essay, “Pandemic Healing Must Find the Courage to Address Inequities,” appeared in August 2020 in Health Progress, the official journal of the Catholic Health Association of the United States. (In October 2020, Pope Francis named him as a cardinal.)
A contest judge praised his essay as “a thoughtful and timely piece of work that really hit home, for me, the challenges that we all face in understanding the lasting impact of this tragedy.”
The essay won first place in the category, “Best Essay – Professional and Special-Interest Magazines.” Health Progress also won a first place award for “Magazine/Newsletter of the Year – National General Interest Magazines,” and in commenting on that honor, the judges highlighted “a compelling issue examining advocacy and equity through public policy.”
In the essay, Cardinal Gregory wrote, “The impact of the coronavirus has furnished even more irrefutable proof of what was already widely known or at least commonly suspected – that there exist vast inequities within our society and social structures when it comes to health, finances and other shared opportunities. The medical statistics associated with this pandemic describe the disproportionate consequential effect of those inequities upon people of color, the poor and the elderly.”
Washington’s archbishop wrote that in addition to providing its traditional healing outreach through medicine and treatments to those impacted by the pandemic, the Catholic Church should also “aggressively urge our elected and public officials to address the reasons that cause this virus to be so dangerously effective within particular segments of society. The church is obliged to align herself with those who demand the reform of oppressive and negligent social structures that cause some people to be more vulnerable than others to this pandemic”
He concluded the essay by writing, “This indeed is the path that we must now follow, in addition to the COVID-19 medical response. We must follow the path to those who are suffering and to challenge the social realities that intensify the suffering of particular segments of the population. This is the Catholic way of healing.”
In the Catholic Standard’s online “Black Catholic Voices” series – which also received a first place honor in the 2021 Catholic Press Awards for “Best Multimedia Package Series,” Cardinal Gregory was asked the question, “People of color – African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans – have been hardest hit by the health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. What does this say about our country, and what should our country do about this?”
In response, Cardinal Gregory said, “Well I wrote an article for the Catholic Health Association publication a couple of months ago describing exactly that. The disparity in how this disease has impacted the communities of color – Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, the poor. It’s a lesson that we still have to address, that some communities, some segments of society, bear the brunt of this disease disproportionate to our numbers but because of the inequities that are still very much present in our world. However, I think it’s also a great opportunity for our country to rediscover our heritage of freedom, our American ingenuity, our need to care for one another in a much more aggressive fashion. I think that Pope Francis’s recent encyclical ‘Fratelli Tutti’ is a contextualization of what we have to do as Catholics but also as men and women of goodwill, as he addressed this encyclical saying that we are all called to see each other as brothers and sisters.”
