Regrettably, too many people these days don’t have a good grasp on historical events. Worse still, it seems they don’t even remember something that happened just a few years ago.
July 4, 1776, is a good example. Every July 4, Americans celebrate “Independence Day” with fireworks and special events. But over time, society has changed the name of this holiday to the less meaningful moniker, “The Fourth of July.”
The fireworks shot off on this holiday commemorate the “rockets red glare” and “bombs bursting in air” – symbols of our forefathers’ fight for our country’s freedom. But most recent generations of Americans do not get the connection.
Special events on “The Fourth” used to include, parades, patriotic concerts and the president’s speech reminding us of America’s bold fight for independence and calling us to be a unified nation. Now in the 21st Century, special events on this holiday consist of barbecuing, sunbathing, and watching a famous hot dog eating championship.
Many adults nowadays no longer remember the patriotism of past Independence Days. And today’s younger generations no longer learn the fundamental reason why July 4th is such an important holiday. And I worry that the significance of the holiday may soon be lost forever.
Even so, this is not about the importance of remembering what happened 250 years ago. It’s about the importance or remembering what happened just six years ago.
The Covid Panic-demic
It was in March of 2020 that both the Church and State started making a lot of mistakes with their overreaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. We need to remember what happened so that it never happens again.
Covid did cause out-of-the-ordinary cases of illness and death. But both the Church and State overreacted when they forced healthy adults and children to take oppressive, overbearing precautions. The elderly certainly needed to take precautions when it came to Covid 19, as it was a virus that was overwhelmingly affecting their age group. But Church and State went too far when they expected all ages and health-statuses to cower, cover, and cooperate with ridiculous edicts.
In the initial weeks of the pandemic many decisions were mistakenly made. These decisions were due to sudden fear and the dissemination of unreliable information. Many of the decisions were based on the March 2020 report from the Imperial College of London.
In retrospect, however, it was this big propaganda piece that kicked off our country’s pandemic-pandemonium. It predicted Covid 19 would cause 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
The media pushed out this unreliable report and gave no opposing reports any airtime. Government officials embraced it as well. And the majority believed the horrific prediction. Human nature caused most people to be willing to do whatever government and health officials told them.
Alarmingly, the majority of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and Church leaders who made mistakes in overreacting to Covid never admitted that they were wrong. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, they set up draconian lockdowns and stirred up hateful bigotry toward those who didn’t fall into line with mask and vaccine mandates.
Now years later, with the grace of hindsight, they still have not admitted they were wrong. By not admitting mistakes, learning will not take place and things will just repeat themselves when Covid 25 or some other “unprecedented event” befalls our country and our world. (The recent news stories about hantavirus are a perfect example.)
Famous college football coach Paul Bear Bryant said, “When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.”
Freedoms Gained and Freedoms Lost
We must never forget the freedoms we gained in 1776. Similarly, we must never forget the freedoms we lost in 2020, 2021 and 2022. We were denied and too easily relinquished our civil rights, personal conscience rights, and fundamental right to worship.
Don’t ever forget that:
- Dioceses locked churches shut;
- Clerics canceled sacraments;
- Parishes stopped reception of the Eucharist;
- Officials did not allow visits to loved ones dying in hospitals;
- Officials canceled funerals or at best did not allow personal consolations; (this video is very disturbing on how mourners – who you know were hugging each other just prior to and right after entering the funeral home – were treated during the funeral ceremony);
- Pastors postponed weddings;
- Superintendents shut down schools;
- Officials forced masks on children and toddlers, let alone adults;
- Police arrested people for playing outdoors at a park, paddling alone in the ocean, and having family gatherings at home;
- Bureaucrats kept people who refused an experimental inoculation out of restaurants, refused them entrance to sporting events, and fired employees from their jobs. Society, including friends and family, shunned many of them.
The masking, 6-foot distancing, and vaccine mandates did not stop Covid but instead caused worse problems. Masking and distancing caused educational loss and social/emotional harm. The vaccine caused injuries and deaths.
Reports five and six years ago countered the mainstream propaganda on Covid 19 precautions and remedies. But the corporate media, the AMA, the CDC, the WHO, and government officials buried and ‘canceled’ these early reports and did not allow them to see the light of day.
Catholic Hierarchy Failings
But it was not only the media and government officials who buried opposing information. Even Catholic Bishops and the Pope himself joined in with the censoring of truth and the pushing of faulty mandates. They even went along with government officials who insisted churches were “non-essential businesses,” and thus, needed to stay locked and closed.
Pope Francis even implied it was sinful and selfish to not take the Covid jab. He called it a “moral obligation” and said, “Ethically, everyone has to get the vaccine.” He required employees and visitors to the Vatican to get inoculated, and he even removed a Bishop who opposed vaccine mandates.
If you know my personal story, my Seattle Archbishop, pastor, and Catholic schools’ superintendent formed a trifecta to force me out of my 40-year job as a Catholic school educator. The reason? I wasn’t willing to get injected with that abortion-connected and untested “vaccine.”
In addition to going along with the vaccine mandates, too many bishops locked up churches, and ordered priests not give the Sacraments. And too many Catholic school administrators refused to let students return to school in a timely manner. Even when the Catholic schools finally opened, most still forced students and teachers to wear “face diapers.” Yet there was no proof this stopped transmission of the virus. There was, however, proof that this hindered the social and academic development of children.
We must never forget that in many states, government officials told churches to lock down while allowing pot shops and liquor stores to remain open. Yet the priests and bishops in those states didn’t complain. Moreover, they didn’t appear the least skeptical of government agencies’ hypocritical, illogical, and obviously politically-driven directives.
We must never forget that a citizen couldn’t receive a Sacrament, but he could buy pot and Scotch. (Drug and alcohol establishments were considered so-called essential businesses.)
We Catholics needed our shepherds to fight the government edict of closing churches. They could have even used the government’s own language of essential business to argue that nothing is more essential than worshipping God. Freedom of religion is even in the Bill of Rights. And there is nothing more essential for our eternal souls.
We must never forget that a large number of clergy genuflected to government bureaucrats rather than to their God.
Did any of these Church leaders – from Pope Francis to Archbishop X to Father Y to Catholic School Superintendent Z – learn from their mistakes? Have any of them admitted they were wrong in going along with the draconian mandates? Have Catholic Church administrators and pastors conceded that, once they did open their churches, they overreacted by secularizing sacred spaces? Was wrapping yellow caution tape around church pews (like they were crime scenes!), and turning sacred spaces into warehouse-looking-buildings by sticking arrows on the ground showing where to walk while keeping the magical 6-foot distance when receiving Communion really necessary?
The answer to all these questions is “No!”
Our Clergy Let Us Down Just Like Our Government Did
I have never expected most government officials or the mainstream media to be humble, reliable, and truth-tellers. But I do expect our Catholic clergy to tell the truth. Six years ago, our freedoms were lost and right to practice our faith was kicked to the curb due to overreactions and poor decisions to the coronavirus. These overreactions destroyed much of the country’s trust in the so-called medical experts and in government agencies.
But worse for authentic Catholics, much of our confidence in our Church leaders was likewise shattered. Unsurprisingly, many Catholics who were locked out of churches in 2020 during the stopping of public Masses never returned to attending Mass after the church doors were reopened.
Any way you look at it, our Church leaders let us down with their initial reactions to Covid in 2020. And they continued making illogical decisions in the two years following.
They let us down by not vociferously directing us to follow the 2,000-year-old advice to turn to the Lord for hope but instead directing us to turn our attention to a president, a governor, and an immunologist. They let us down by making their foremost concern the fear of the temporal, physical harm that a virus might do to their and their parishioners’ fleshly bodies while disregarding concern for their flocks’ eternal souls. It is concern for souls that is their fundamental job description.
It appears that many clerics have forgotten the words of the great Catholic thinker and author, St. John Vianney:
“Oh, my children, how sad it is! Three-quarters of those who are Christians labor for nothing but to satisfy this body, which will soon be buried and corrupted, while they do not give a thought to their poor soul, which must be happy or miserable for all eternity.”
We expect our popes, bishops, and priests to be more concerned with the supernatural than the natural. They didn’t go to medical school to be the ones to take care of our physical bodies. They went to seminary and were ordained to look out for our spiritual souls.
When bishops ordain priests, the priests promise to “preach the Gospel and teach the Catholic faith” and to “celebrate faithfully and reverently the mysteries of Christ, especially the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, for the glory of God and the sanctification of the Christian people.” At no time when they receive the sacrament of Holy Orders do priests promise to look after the bodily needs of the people or to embrace the edicts of their county’s department of health.
Jesus was an innocent man sentenced to death, and yet He was still able to say regarding his tormentors, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” So, I am willing to do likewise and assume the mistakes the clergy made in 2020-22 to lock up their churches and Catholic schools, to stop administering the sacraments, and to fire Catholic employees for not taking the covid “vaccine” were done out of ignorance.
However, when the majority of priests and other Church leaders still to this day will not admit they made mistakes in how they responded to the pandemic, then what am I to think? Can we not at least expect them to confess they have learned from their mistakes so in the future they will stay within their areas of authority to promote and promulgate the Faith?
Don’t Join the Sheeple
In a similar fashion, would all those lay persons, who six years ago uncritically acquiesced to whatever authorities said regarding Covid-connected directives and commands, do me a favor? If – or I should say, when – the next unprecedented crisis occurs in our country (e.g. hantavirus, bird flu, monkeypox), would you vow here and now to commit to three things?
- That you will not blindly follow bureaucratic diktats and follow silly commands like sheep (such as the masking rules when at a restaurant);
- That you will fight for your and your neighbors’ civil liberties;
- That you will demand your priest and bishop tend to your spiritual soul more than fearing bodily ills.
It took 40 years after World War II before the American government apologized for the mistake it made in incarcerating 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during the war. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait until 2060 for apologies to the Covid 19 overreactions.
I pray that today’s government and religious leaders have learned that “when you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.”
Writer and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, once said, “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”
The shameful aberrations that both Church and State leaders allowed, which forfeited our civil liberties and squashed our religious freedoms as recently as just a few years ago, must never happen again.
