Question

how did the church affect how people reacted to the Black Death?

Answer 1

Any disaster of the time was interpreted through a religious framework, including bad weather, defeat in battle, crop failure, etc. The plague was no different, and religious leaders generally assumed that it was God's punishment for Christians' sins, or at best a great hardship sent to test them. This does not mean that they taught resignation to it, however; church charitable foundations, already in existence, did their best to serve the sick under the circumstances (not that there was much they could do), and it appears that most priests stayed with their flocks, performing last rites and burying the dead. In fact, it's likely that the death rate among priests was higher than the population at large precisely because they exposed themselves to carriers on a regular basis. On the other hand, of course, people are people and there were plenty of clergy who abandoned their posts and tried to isolate themselves, as did many others in the community.

There was a certain amount of apocalypticism stoked by the plague, preaching that the end of the world was nigh, and the plague also released a lot of hostility toward Jews and lepers, suspected of having caused it by poisoning wells. In general, however, the upper ranks of the church hierarchy rejected these panic reactions and stuck to the more conservative line that Christians should take the plague as a warning to repent of their sins and live more virtuous lives.

One should remember that while the plague lasts about four or five years in our history books, that's the period of its spread across all of Europe. In any given location there was a cycle of only about two months from the appearance of symptoms in the first victims until the death of the last ones, at which point the plague had killed perhaps 25-30% of the population and burned itself out. So while it was a massive disruption, it was also a relatively brief one; people didn't have to change their whole lives to adapt to living in plague conditions for years on end.

Answer 2

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