Coronavirus: Frontline father sees horror at its worst in New York

Stephen Howe walks among the dying in New York’s poorest neighbourhoods, offering comfort to those living their final days in the grip of COVID-19.

Adelaide-born priest Stephen Howe anoints an elderly woman in intensive care at St John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, New York; she has since recovered sufficiently to leave the ICU.

Stephen Howe walks among the dying in New York’s poorest neighbourhoods and smaller hospitals, offering comfort to those living their final days in the grip of COVID-19.

For the 37-year-old priest, who grew up in the Adelaide Hills, the horror of the pandemic that has now claimed more than 100,000 lives across the US is writ large in Yonkers, near Manhattan, where he is based.

In the past two months, Father Howe has become a regular presence at St John’s Riverside, the 150-bed hospital in Yonkers, which has been overwhelmed by the crisis. A refrigerator truck was required not long ago when the hospital morgue reached capacity.

Father Howe spends his time on the wards praying with patients, hearing their confessions, giving communion and simply listening to those who want someone to engage with.

Visits to patients in the intensive care unit are often brief. Most are in a coma.

But those in the main ward are talkative. Starved of human contact and in a sterile environment, they welcome him warmly — even those who are not religious.

The strict isolation norms imposed in hospitals mean that victims often suffer alone, separated from family and loved ones who are not allowed to visit them.

“Many who are in the hospital feel abandoned and helpless,” ­Father Howe says. “They want so badly just to go home and lead normal lives again.

“Some are losing their will to live and the nurses ask me to try to motivate them to keep fighting.”

He understands the helplessness of the locals. In March, as the first wave of his parishioners started to come down with COVID-19, the Australian also contracted the disease and fell seriously ill.

He says he has never been so sick. “It’s like being beaten and left for dead.”

The virus left Father Howe ­unable to leave his bedroom for 12 days straight, and he couldn’t leave the house for weeks.

He was healthy prior to the pandemic, and his relative youth helped him to pull through.

The fatigue has lingered, but it’s a small price to pay. He has a level of immunity that allows him to visit those infected with COVID-19, but he still wears protective gear when he is on the ward, or at the homes of the sick.

Father Howe meets Pope Francis in St Peter’s Basilica in 2014.

Father Howe recounts some gut-wrenching personal tales from inside St John’s.

He regularly visited a single mother of five who was on a ventilator for a month, her condition deteriorating as her organs slowly shut down.

“The children came to our church to pray for their mum every evening,” he says.

She died last week.

Then there was the man who was in quite good spirits earlier this month but when Father Howe saw him a second time last week he was barely recognisable behind his ventilator as he gasped for air.

“I blessed him, holding up my phone so he and his family could see each other,” he says.

“Later that evening I got a call to say that he had passed away. What a privilege to be able to give them those last precious moments with their father.”

He visited another elderly woman in the hospital recently. “I couldn’t tell her I had come ­directly from the funeral of her husband of over 50 years.”

She still doesn’t know. The family is afraid to tell her.

Across the state of New York, COVID-19 fatalities are nearing 30,000. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, while the number of those who are left homeless and hungry each day is beyond calculation.

Father Howe’s mostly Hispanic parishioners at St Peter and St Denis are among the poorest in the US. Most of them have not been able to access government ­financial relief.

In the past two months the number of people accessing one of the local church’s food pantries has risen from 250 to more than 600.

“We try not to turn anyone away but some of the last people who arrive don’t get a whole lot, unfortunately,” Father Howe says.

The oldest of five children from a devoutly Catholic family, Father Howe left Adelaide when he was 18 to join the Legionaries of Christ in the US.

He describes the priesthood as a “beautiful life, not easy but deeply fulfilling. At the end of the day, when your organs are shutting down and you’re on a ventilator struggling to breathe, science does not answer the fundamental questions of who we are.

“I love science, but it goes silent when we get to some of the deepest things in life.

“Science is silent on themes that the people I meet in hospital care deeply about and which give them hope: love, God, existential meaning, life after death and ­suffering, to name a few.”