なんでも翻訳してやるから英文持って来い 21

よろしくお願いします。
一応自分ではわかっているつもりですが、確認のため質問させていただきます。

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/25/coronavirus-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-humanism/
このサイトの文章中に以下の段落があります。

It is a truism that the Black Death helped produce the age of humanism.
Through making death ever-present, the plague undermined a system
of religious authority in which the church and the church alone claimed to
have answers to the fundamental questions of human existence; the priests
naturally still asserted that this was the case but were now as likely as not
to drop dead once they did so. Amid the dissolution of the church’s
legitimacy as well as, more specifically, its monopoly on truth and salvation,
survivors began tending to all that was immediate and material, specifically
in the form of the particular and the human.

ここの the priests naturally still asserted that this was the case but were
now as likely as not to drop dead once they did so.
の訳をお願いします。