The outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic has exposed the limits of science and the capacity for technological solutions to all problems, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

Up to this, people felt “that the progress of modern science and culture would quickly be able to respond to any global health crisis by rapidly producing a cure or a vaccine that would resolve the question and allow us to continue in the way we lived,” he said.

“Now we realise that a pandemic can emerge and spread and indeed reappear. We also have realised that in public health terms, medicine, cures and vaccines, actions from somewhere in society cannot alone resolve our problems,” he said.

Speaking in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral, he advised that “in the months and years to come we will have to face and live with the challenges that the pandemic has brought and will leave us with. People will be insecure. Jobs will be lost at all levels in society. Precariousness will affect so many of the things that in the past gave us a sense of security.”

In such a scenario, the church “must find ways of witnessing to the fact that society needs care and love,” he said.