There is still zero evidence that churches and businesses are in any way significantly complicit in the spread of the Wuhan virus. As RedState reported: "[T]here was never a shred of scientific evidence that putting healthy people in quarantine would do anything to ameliorate the spread of COVD-19. Moreover, everything we knew about viruses made the idea of quarantining people who aren't sick completely absurd. Even the CDC's most recent pandemic planning guide from 2017 admitted that "direct evidence for the effectiveness of these measures is limited.' And by ‘limited' they meant non-existent. There wasn't a single study that supports the idea that quarantining healthy people was going to do a damn thing to stop a virus from spreading. The European Centre for Disease Control's summary of the research was more honest. They noted that "there are few, if any, empirical data underpinning" the assumptions that workplace/church closures do anything to stop viruses from spreading. Indeed, they found no evidence for the effectiveness of any social distancing measures. In spite of the science and the months of real-time data that proved it unnecessary, the left has persisted with shutting down businesses and churches. As a result of these state-enforced lockdowns, hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the U.S. have shut down — many of them permanently."
Yet nearly across the board Catholic bishops acquiesced in unprecedented restrictions on the life of the Church, in the lifelines of the Faith with hardly a contrary word. They in essence actually told their flocks to avoid Church, that things of the flesh take precedent over the things of the spirit--meanwhile other establishments with similar interpersonal interactions remained open and busy.
With a Catholic share of the US population down to 20% many may say if the priests aren’t going to commit to our religion, to living the Truth in authentic spiritual leadership and to be there for us why should we bother coming back, if the obligations of faith can be lifted, arbitrarily, as a true reading of medical science informs us?
Catholicism after all is a physical religion. Or as our current pope would say, it is a religion of encounter. Catholicism is also a sacramental religion, first and foremost a Eucharist religion. And our Church is the substantial presence of Christ, that is shared. Christ is not a presence on a screen, an isolated image without substance.
“The bishops’ decision to fall in line behind their bureaucratic masters could prove devastating to the presence of the church in our aggressively secular society.”—Peter Vree
“Christians must recognize they aren’t resisting a different politics but what is effectively a rival religion called by the misnomer Progressivism.”—Rod Dreher
“We couldn’t have killed the true understanding of the Eucharist better if we had hired the Eucharist heretics of ages past to come back and preach to us.”—Msgr. Eric R. Barr
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