‘I was Born into Moral Injury’: Viral Implications of COVID-19 on Healthcare Chaplaincy

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic quickly ruptured into pandemics. The multivalent stressors of the virus have laid bare the vast inequalities of the United States. These inequalities are brought to the surface in healthcare, and staff are confronted with three realities: caring for patients and families, caring for interdisciplinary colleagues, and caring for oneself. However, within the reality of COVID-19 is the pandemic of anti-Black racism as a virus continuing to kill the vulnerable. Chaplains, tasked with providing holistic care, must harness an intersectional analysis for the ways in which the most vulnerable and marginalized are impacted by these pandemics. Utilizing the hermeneutical framework of moral injury, I argue that COVID-19 reveals a betrayal of our societal moral values and a revelatory clarion call that our silence in the face of anti-Black racism is complicity with its mendacity. To heal these wounds, solidarity becomes an embodied intervention.