The church buries its priests
The clergy die faster than anyone
The arithmetic is brutal and specific.
In England, records survive of benefices — church livings — that fell vacant during the plague years of 1348–1349. In some dioceses, a third of the beneficed clergy died. In others, nearly half. In the diocese of Bath and Wells, the bishop issues an emergency decree allowing laypeople to hear the confession of the dying when no priest is available — an extraordinary departure from centuries of practice.
In France, the papacy at Avignon loses a third of its own officials to the plague in 1348. Pope Clement VI, who has already issued a bull declaring that Jews are not responsible for the plague — they are dying at the same rate as everyone else, he notes accurately — spends the worst months sitting between two large fires, which his physicians believe will purify the air.
He survives. Many of his cardinals do not.
In Germany, the flagellant movement sweeps the towns — thousands of men and women publicly whipping themselves in procession, hoping that extreme penance will appease the God they believe is punishing them. The Pope condemns the movement in 1349. The flagellants do not stop.
In Italy, Boccaccio writes the Decameron — ten young people fleeing the plague in Florence, telling stories to each other in a country villa. The stories are funny, bawdy, human. It is the best literature to come out of the plague, and it comes out of the impulse to laugh in the face of death.
The church buried its priests. The priests buried their congregations. The congregations buried each other. And somehow they kept going.
“There was such a fear, such trembling, such grief and lamentation that I do not know how to tell of it.”
— Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Preface, c. 1353 AD
“It is of the LORD's lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn't fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies are new every morning.
This was written by someone sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem after its destruction — a person for whom the worst had already happened, who was writing not from safety but from the rubble.
The church that came through the Black Death was not intact. It was diminished, traumatized, permanently changed. What it had believed about divine protection and institutional permanence could no longer be believed in the same way.
But it came through. Not because it was strong but because the love it was built around was not dependent on the health of its institutions.
Great is your faithfulness — written from ruins, believed in plague, confessed across every catastrophe the church has survived.
What ruins are you confessing it from today?