What will it take, I wonder, to wake our people up?

The other day I was alerted to The Emerging Nowa Huta, an article as yet unpublished, by Professor Douglas Farrow of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. It exposes the lie behind proposed vaccine mandates, and other disturbing trends to which Christians are being duped into following. It’s well worth the read. Just take a moment, go to the bottom of the list I posted where you’ll find it, and read it.

What, indeed, are we to make of all this virus madness? At first almost everyone, myself included, was led to believe that what we faced last year was one of the deadliest plagues ever released on the world, and this led us to move voluntarily, in fear, toward some pretty extreme measures to protect ourselves. It took me several weeks to come to the realization that something about these measures was drastically wrong. Turning a visitor away from church was what brought me to my senses. As soon as I had done that I realized that this was madness, and I repented and, as it were, awoke.

At least, I thought back in relief, I had not taken the dreadful measure of wearing a mask while feeding my flock the Gospel and the Sacrament. For that I knew—ah, would that everyone would know!—would be the beginning of failure in my called and ordained duty to carry out the ministry of Jesus, in the stead of Jesus, toward his people. No, I would not do that. The minister of Christ is not a disembodied spirit. He is a man, because Jesus is a man. He is a living icon. The Biblical requirement that a pastor be a man is not arbitrary, any more than the incarnation itself is arbitrary. God did not flip a coin to determine whether he would become incarnate as a male or a female. It has to do with the creation of Adam, and of Eve from Adam, as St. Paul has explained.

Yet as time wore on, I began to realize how much blindness remains, as the second wave of this “plague” now seeks to engulf us again. No matter that the death rate in the US and Canada per 100,000 remains at or near zero, while the authorities are somberly telling us again what grave danger we are in. No matter that even those ridiculously low figures are themselves exaggerated by comorbidities, etc. No matter that the research on mask effectiveness—especially the kinds of masks most people wear—is becoming ever more suspicious (why are contrary voices being silenced and cancelled rather than argued with?). No matter that masks themselves produce an array of unwanted difficulties, especially in children.

And meanwhile there are still too many among us who support such measures.

The swiftness with which anti-vaxxers like Naomi Wolf are being cancelled is jaw-dropping. Why not just argue with her? Why remove her? I have to wonder, then, whether to consider what she is saying, do I not? Then there’s the astonishing opinion of Dr. Peter McCullough, a doctor of internal medicine and board-certified cardiologist and professor of medicine from Texas A & M College, which has already been flagged by Facebook. He thinks the whole pandemic from the beginning was about the vaccine. He notes with justifiable alarm the worldwide push for the prevalence of “needle in every arm” campaigns, and that people are being forced to comply. He worries about the increase in dangerous,. even lethal, adverse reactions to the vaccine, and even that “the vaccine stakeholders . . . want to be in the church. Americans . . . should be extraordinarily alarmed.”

The kind of cancellation now common for Facebook and Twitter is part of the picture, it would seem. One has to wonder why it’s becoming so common. In the past, even the worst of tinfoil hat theories were not cancelled, but argued with, so that sane people could set them aside on their own. No longer. Now they’re just flagged, or removed. This in itself is Orwellian and shocking.

The Church must respond to this kind of increasing madness, if only by keeping her doors open, eschewing on-line and ridiculous kinds of “communion” and all other on-line excuses for not worshiping together, and coming to her senses. To moralize and call masking and vaccinating a form of loving your neighbor, especially if it is done authoritatively, is especially disconcerting, coming at least perilously close to being an egregious sin against the second commandment, which tells us that we should not lie or deceive by the name of God. It is incumbent upon the Church to speak the truth in the face of lies, whatever the cost.

But I, in the midst of all this, am beginning to feel a bit like George Bailey: Can’t you understand what’s happening here?