COVID-19 pandemic: Fatigue, burnout hit spiritual leaders on the front lines of faith

There have been anecdotes of burnout, stress, and mental health issues among spiritual leaders, which problems have only been amplified by the pandemic.

On Christmas Eve 2020, Rev. John Lemire got ready for work: two funerals and three masses.

The Catholic priest in Timmins, Ont., felt “somewhat exhausted” after presiding at back-to-back funeral services but had to quickly switch to the joyful mode of celebrating Christmas. Never far from his mind were the concerns of his parishioners as another COVID-19 lockdown loomed.

The fatigue Lemire describes is not uncommon among the country’s spiritual leaders, who some see as the forgotten front-line workers. Priests, rabbis and imams say they are nearing the breaking point as the strains of their job have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Lemire, who ministers at the Sacred Heart of Jesus and St. Anthony of Padua Cathedral parishes in Timmins, does not consider himself to have suffered from burnout, but he says others have.

“I think burnout implies that they are no longer able to function and we do see that occasionally, both before the pandemic and after the pandemic,” he said in a recent interview. He attributes the problem to a number of factors, including what he sees as a push in contemporary Canadian culture to keep God out of everyday life and discredit voices of the religious, as well as an increased workload for a shrinking clergy.

“When nobody else seems to be doing something, somehow society turns to the church,” Lemire said. “’Oh, you should be working on homelessness, you should be working on food banks, you should be working on palliative care, you should be doing this and that.”

Joel Thiessen, a sociology professor at Ambrose University, a private Christian institution in Calgary, said that while data is lacking in Canada, he has heard anecdotes of burnout, stress and mental health issues among spiritual leaders. The problems have only been amplified by the pandemic, he said.

“It’s probably always come with the territory, like other social service roles or front-line roles,” Thiessen said. People assume that spiritual leaders are “superhuman almost” who give up time with their families to tend to their communities, he said.