Let’s see.
Housebound by this COVID-19 crisis, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Probably more than reasonable people might consider healthy. Nevertheless, this is what I’ve learned so far: This virus-induced crisis, driven by universal and dogmatic hype, appears to have many sources.
A wet market in Wuhan China is one; a bio-weaponry lab yards from the wet market in Wuhan is another; a vial of bio-weaponized virus said to have been stolen from other possible sources including an unnamed lab in Winnipeg is a third.
This crisis is also speculated to have possible motivations beyond the spontaneous, the accidental or the merely unfortunate. The forcing of mandatory micro-chipped vaccinations by the State on an unsuspecting public is one; the intentional collapse of national economies is another. All making way for the silent implementation of a New World Order empowered by a new international monetary system, which is the third. And echoed in a timely fashion by Henry Kissinger who, in a column in The Wall Street Journal April 3, predicted this pandemic will forever alter the World Order.
Yet this crisis has provoked plenty of skeptics as well, one a scientist from MIT who insists that it will one day be seen for what he says it is: the greatest hoax in human history. This unprecedented lock-down said to be for the public good and protection is raising deeper suspicions as well, such as those of Brexit campaigner, Nigel Farage, who’s asking why the entire world is now under house arrest for ‘safety’ reasons which, in his view, remain unjustified yet mystifyingly accepted. Some are even asking how much of this is actually real and how much is media smoke and mirrors?
The point is this: with the passing days and all the footage of deserted streets and devastation we’re now watching from the confinement of our homes, this pandemic is appearing less and less spontaneous, less and less accidental.
So it’s hardly surprising that serious questions are at long last being raised over the increasingly draconian measures being imposed to control the social behaviour of massive populations while equally massive job losses and general carnage are being inflicted unquestioningly on their economies. Measures, I might add, now being doubly enforced at precisely the time that questions are being raised about the necessity and even the legitimacy of such a totalitarian response to a virus we’re assured is a killer. But is it?
A true killer?
Is it a true killer, like the ebola virus was until a vaccine was discovered? Or is COVID-19 something more in line with the waves of influenza that recur annually?
This is the central question, for which there are only the ‘official’ answers that governments and NGOs around the world have supplied.
In his 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay notes that in all the recorded manias in history, the pattern is consistent. Be it the craze for Dutch tulips or the Southsea Bubble and so many others, Mackay found that human folly is consistent throughout history and changes only in its detail, not its scale: “They go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,” he concludes. The result of each of these periods of collective hysteria have been consistent as well: financial devastation, even famine, and a ponderously slow restoration of once sound economies.
Hardly a reassuring model and just as worrying is the computer modelling (similar to those used to predict climate change) now being used by governments around the world to further frighten now-housebound nations into total submission with potentially high numbers of deaths which, in the end, will almost invariably be overstated by four or five times.
How helpful is that? Certainly not to the housebound, nor to families watching their jobs disappear. Yet these models are a compellingly powerful tool for government leaders and local martinets to increase their power to dangerous levels. And to demand ever more funding, such as the UN – whose World Health Organization has just been confirmed as the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist government – now calling for a global tax of at least 10% of national GDPs. “There is no time to lose in mounting the most robust, cooperative health response the world has ever seen,” the global body states.
And so it goes … yet given that this pandemic is just the latest global bubble inflating an ever-expanding vacuum of dependable information , I can only view this massive international meltdown philosophically because …. What else can I do? Except record my observations of how the world seems to be changing. And ponder their meaning.
Some Observations
My first observation is how irrelevant all those burning social justice questions have become in mere weeks. Questions about gender selection and whether or not gender corrective surgery is important to, say, a preteen? Questions about political correctness in references to China. Does anyone – except now-irrelevant social justice warriors – care whether referring to where the virus may have come from is some bizarre form of thought crime? If we’re talking life and death, how does this possibly matter? Or are we? Talking life and death, I mean?
My second observation is that as power-mad governments around the world pretend to have power over life and death – a power which belongs exclusively to God Whose mercy they don’t want – they ban individuals from His Churches and sacraments. For their safety! How convenient is that for the prince of this world, the arch deceiver who hates God and His Church?
So here we all are. Confronted daily by photos and videos of masked people and distressed patients on stretchers, we are easily convinced that we too are under physical threat of death with only our governments to protect us. I mean, it looks true. But is it?
Yes, I know, what an awful thing to even suggest! Except for that unsettling (and not the first) discovery the other day that a New York media outlet used footage from an Italian hospital to illustrate mayhem in New York. Without apology. Here’s my question: since it’s highly unlikely this was a one-off, how often has such misreporting been happening? And where else?
My question is this: given the world wide media’s flight into flagrant leftist politics and away from any standard of truth and hard journalistic facts, why should any population or individual have faith in what they’re seeing? Or hearing?
It’s an important question. As is this question: what are we really seeing? And hearing?
Confronting Mortality
Amidst all the professional opinions, what I think I’m seeing is the whole world suddenly confronted with the reality of death – personal mortality – in a way it hasn’t been confronted in decades. Decades during which it indulged itself in every form of fantasy known to man! Including the so-called ‘Death of God.’ Along with the utterly bizarre phenomenon of ritual abortion, which must be performed in any and all circumstances including throughout this pandemic and, one supposes, even to Armageddon. Oh, yes, western governments are promising – along with replacement paycheques to laid-off workers – that abortions will be carried out no matter what! Prompting this question: what heinous bargain is really at work here?
Which is what turns my attention to what this crisis – whether real or invented or contrived – is all about.
Shutting Out God
Despite the worldwide attempt to shut Him out, the Lord God is saying – as only He can – remember ME? The One who made you – each and every one of you? The One who carved each of you in the palm of My hand and died in agony for your sins and your salvation?
Yes, THAT God. The One now reminding us that HE, not we, is in charge. And that all we have can be taken away in an instant. By His hand, not the world’s, which has for so long been under the destructive, God-and-Man-hating management of Satan and his fallen angels.
When faced with death, those Catholic truths said by secularists to be ‘myths’ are not myths at all. The teachings in the Old and New Testaments are real and true and in every century their truth has been manifest again and again. And manifest the hard way – through wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes, floods and much else – because Man, Who the Lord God made in His own Likeness and Image, is so proud, so stubborn, so hard to teach, just as the Bible says.
And here we are again … in another crisis, the actual cause of which is beyond our control. So what matters are its consequences. How many, in the various foxholes of life, will now turn back to God? How many will now take their own mortality and salvation seriously?
Wasn’t it St.Thomas Aquinas who regarded capital punishment as morally justifiable and who observed how a sentence of death “concentrated the mind wonderfully?”
Italy’s Agony
Well, it’s that process which now appears underway in Italy – if only anecdotally – in this once devoutly Catholic nation where St. Peter’s Square is empty while tens of thousands are said to have been dying of COVID-19. With little to no respite so far. And in Holy Week too.
Yet the following observations from an Italian physician are worth noting:
“Even in my worst nightmares, I would never have expected to see and live the events that have occurred in our hospital over the last three weeks. This horror is increasing every day; it’s become unmanageable and we have become ineffective. At first, only a few people came, then it was hundreds, and now, we are no longer doctors but selectors… We have to decide who will live, and who will die by sending them home, even though these people have duly paid their taxes in Italy. Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I were atheists. Belief in science was the norm. And science eliminates God’s presence. I had always laughed at my parents for going to Mass.
Then a miracle began: “Nine days ago, a 75-year old pastor came to us with severe respiratory problems. He had a Bible and would read passages every day to those who were dying and hold their hands. We were both mentally and physically exhausted, and bitter, but when we had the time we would sit down and listen. We have to admit that, as humans, we have reached our limits, we can’t do any more! More and more people are dying every day. We are exhausted; two of our colleagues have died and others are barely standing. We realised that mankind’s scientific knowledge is limited and that we need God! We started to pray whenever we had a few minutes. It’s incredible, but even as committed atheists, we came to God and found peace! He helps us persevere so we can care for the patients. Yesterday, this 75-year old shepherd passed away. We were devastated as never before (despite having seen 120 deaths over the last week). Because this old shepherd, whilst he was with us, managed to bring back peace to us, a peace I had had no hope of ever finding. The shepherd has gone to be with the Lord and we will follow soon.”
Meanwhile in Spain
In Spain, where a hell similar to Italy’s has been unfolding, there is no sign so far – at least not publicly – that the Spaniards have fallen to their knees in fear, repentance and supplication to God. They’ve just registered their fury, however, with a lawsuit against their government (comprised of a coalition of Socialists and Communists) for alleged negligence in its handling of the pandemic. The government is accused of putting its narrow ideological interests ahead of public safety, and, in so doing, unnecessarily worsening the crisis.
A class action lawsuit filed March 19 accuses the Spanish government of knowingly endangering public safety by encouraging hundreds of thousands to participate in more than 75 feminist marches across that country on March 8, to mark International Women’s Day. According to the lawsuit, the government was allegedly so determined to ensure the feminist marches took place that it deliberately downplayed warnings about the pandemic and failed to report new cases. Until five days later when the Spanish government announced a nationwide state of emergency, effectively placing 46 million people in lockdown for at least two weeks – now the strictest in all of Europe as the epidemic continues to rage.
Wherefore politicians?
Which raises another important question. Why this consistent pattern by countless politicos across the West – including New York mayor Bill deBlasio, Florence mayor Dario Nardella and Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, among many others – to downplay the risk and encourage the public to go out and enjoy themselves? That is, until the disease became so well entrenched that suddenly the harshest of measures were required? And required for an indefinite period of time, during which unimaginable economic devastation is almost certain to result? We’ll probably never know the answer but those who survive may be about to witness a much changed world. Straight ahead.
The Spiritual Side
Which brings us to the spiritual side of this pandemic which raises the eternal question: Is this international catastrophe the result of sin? Is it a chastisement from God? which, in turn, raises two more observations, both deeply troubling.
The first is the shutdown of Catholic churches around the world with the approval of the Vatican and local bishops everywhere who appear to have placed their trust in the State and its human institutions and scientific ‘models’ rather than in God.
The second is Pope Francis’ recent (and confirmed) claim that the coronavirus is thanks to nature being angry with mankind for not protecting the earth. Yet Holy Mother Church has always taught what Jesus taught. And what the Old Testament has taught repeatedly: That great evils such as pestilence are an effect of original sin and our actual sins, some of which cry out to Heaven for vengeance, including wilful murder and sodomy. Yet catastrophically, our entire culture has become so secular, so distant from God and so rebellious towards His natural and moral order – which created us and sustains us—that we’ve actually closed the doors to all His churches and all His tabernacles on earth, even adoration chapels! Rather than seeking Him in every one of these places as the first recourse, we seek the assistance of the State over a virus which medically may not deserve the panic-mongering now imprisoning our world.
What folly!
Nor is there anywhere, not even in St. Peter’s Square, public repentance led by a kneeling Pope begging God for forgiveness, as instructed in 2 Chronicles.” If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
Instead, we hear Pope Francis, in his Urbi et Orbi blessing of March 27, publicly address the Lord God thus: “You ask us not to be afraid. Yet our faith is weak and we are fearful. But you, Lord, will not leave us at the mercy of the storm.” But wasn’t this precisely the hour when the Pope might – in the exhortatory sense – have expressed and emphasized the need for personal repentance, in world leaders, in all of us, against the heinous crimes against life and sexuality which may well be what is bringing this scourge – more spiritual than anything else – upon us?
So forget whether or not there will be a second wave of whatever-this-is and all its punishments. Whatever-this-is is the consequence of our forsaking the God Who Made Us and placing our faith in the State rather than Him. It’s this affront to the Lord God that worries me, far more than any of the above considerations.
Come Lord Jesus.