By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“The left takes its vision seriously — more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep” — Thomas Sowell.
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A year ago, who would have dreamed that a policeman would arrest someone walking on a lonely beach, or a father playing with his daughter on the sidewalk outside their home? Or that a racist, pro-infanticide governor would order our bishops to bar Catholics from going to Mass for months on end? And that they would obey him?
Yet, here we are, a year later, with millions of us willing to endure a strictly enforced home incarceration until we receive permission to leave.
“If people are free to do as they wish, they are almost certain not to do as we wish,” says Thomas Sowell, a Hoover Institution scholar. And he’s right. Most of us are willing, even pleased, to enjoy the fruits of liberty that allow us to live peacefully alongside neighbors who don’t always act in perfectly pleasing ways.
Yes, most of us, but not all of us. Some people are not happy if we’re happy. Even the occasional government clerk behind the counter falls prey to the temptation to boss us around. After all, without his permit, we’re stuck. In many countries, we just bribe him. In America, that practice is not yet ubiquitous, nor is it so blatant when it occurs at all.
But how do you bribe a blackface, pro-abortion governor who calls abortion “essential” but the practice of the faith “non-essential”?
A few years ago EWTN ran a report about a Russian town 1,000 kilometers north of Vladivostok, right across the Bering Strait from Alaska. In fact, the priest there was from the Archdiocese of Anchorage. The town had been a Soviet prison camp for years, and one survivor recalled the day that a new commissar arrived. When all the residents were herded into the square, he was blunt: “I don’t want your work,” he told them, “I want your suffering.”
He was only following orders. His job — and his life — were on the line. When Lenin was consolidating his power after the Russian Revolution, he traveled east by train and stopped at every village on the way. Before he left Moscow, he wired the commissars in each village. “If you don’t have a bourgeois hanging from every lamppost in the village when I arrive,” he wrote, “you’ll be hanging there when I leave.”
Across the country we are watching petty commissars throw their weight around. They’re all too happy to enforce even the most crackpot diktats. “You can sell vegetables but not seeds,” orders Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who is vying for the VP slot on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tells “the Jewish community” who defied his social distancing orders that “I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups” (he apologized several days later).
OK, some swaggering pols make stupid rules. But when their apparatchiki happily enforce them, why are we surprised? After all, they’re “just following orders.” Many of us are shocked, many are dismayed. But the Swagger Factor — that delight in discovering that you get to tell strangers how to live their lives and they meekly obey you — is as great a temptation in a free country as it was in the Soviet Union.
Every day it’s becoming increasingly clear that the economic and social destruction wrought by the lockdowns is going to cause more suffering, misery, even death, than the Wuhan Virus ever will. It already has. But Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is riding high. He insists that Virginians not be “divisive” by demanding they be allowed to preserve their livelihood. Translated, of course, he means, “I want your obedience!”
Even if it causes massive suffering long after the virus is past?
Gov. Northam is pleased at how well we behave. This is not new. A year ago he calmly explained on Washington radio station WTOP how a baby who survived abortion might be allowed to die. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” he said.
Yes, this murderous pediatrician would make sure that the infant (he admits it! It’s a baby!) is “kept comfortable” — gasping for breath until she dies. He wants her suffering! But even more horrific is his casual description of the calm conversation that the mother and the family would have while watching their child die.
This is the dehumanization that the Left demands of all of us — because they deny our very humanity. They know better than we do what’s good for us, so it’s natural that they should force us to do it. Like obedient sheep.
Should we let them?
TV? Or Not TV?
Catholic bishops in Europe and the Americas are dealing with widespread blowback against their blanket cancellation of public Masses and most other sacraments. Here in Virginia, Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge and Richmond Bishop Barry Knestout both based their decision in response to the lockdown order of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The governor’s order forbids all “unessential” religious services until June 10, while leaving bars, grocery stores, and abortion mills open.
A lot of us wonder whether the bishops’ decision, understandably made under intense pressure both of events and from the Democrats in Richmond, might have set a bad precedent.
Gov. Northam’s order was not universally welcomed, and neither was the bishops’ acquiescence. Chanceries suggested that Catholics tune in to Masses televised over the Internet or cable television. On that particular, Fr. Jerry Pokorsky, a pastor in the Arlington Diocese, took to the Catholic Culture, an online journal, to warn of what he calls “the dangers of live-streaming Masses.”
“Bishops have canceled the public celebration of the Mass in obedience to government authorities,” Pokorsky writes, calling the streaming of Internet Masses a “quasi-liturgical innovation [that] may have problematic long-term ramifications.”
Pokorsky invokes Pope John Paul II, who in 1979 “encouraged priests in their sacred ministry. St. John Paul’s words were remarkably prescient,” Pokorsky wrote:
“Think of the places where people anxiously await a Priest, and where for many years, feeling the lack of such a Priest, they do not cease to hope for his presence. And sometimes it happens that they meet in an abandoned shrine, and place on the altar a stole which they still keep, and recite all the prayers of the Eucharistic liturgy; and then, at the moment that corresponds to the transubstantiation a deep silence comes down upon them, a silence sometimes broken by a sob…so ardently do they desire to hear the words that only the lips of a Priest can efficaciously utter. So much do they desire Eucharistic Communion, in which they can share only through the ministry of a Priest.”
Going against the grain, Fr. Pokorsky recommends that, “during these unfortunate times, it seems better to emphasize the Real Presence of Jesus in traditional ways: in the gathering of two or three (but not more than ten so as not to violate governmental decrees!), reading of the Word, and a spiritual Communion — yearning for the Real Presence in better times.
“In the meantime,” Pokorsky continues, “active clerical and lay resistance to governmental claims that church attendance is ‘non-essential’ would affirm authentically Catholic worship: We must not allow the virtual reality of electronic images to replace our desire for the Real Presence.”
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