The non-essential Church in the Post-COVID World
Excerpts from a video featuring Christopher Ferrara (Catholic attorney, author, pro-life activist and journalist) published on April 27, 2020.
The Church no longer stands in opposition to the State; the State grows ever more powerful. And we end up with a socialist enterprise in which people’s lives are managed by the State, and the Church submits to it! Which is exactly what is happening now: the Church shuts down because of a state decree.
All the churches are closed! You can’t even go to Confession. Not even during the Roman persecution [did we see this]! Christians were in the catacombs, they still had their Masses in the catacombs. My friend John Rao, a brilliant historian, said he woke up in the middle of the night and he realized what had happened: The Church has declared itself non-essential!
This [quarantine] has accomplished what even the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution could not accomplish. When the Church is willing to say that her services, the Sacraments, the pathway to Salvation, is non-essential, how can she ever teach with authority again?
A federal judge in one case, in which he struck down the attempt to prevent religious gatherings, said as follows: ‘If beer is essential, then so is Easter!’ How is it that the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t understand this?
What the Church has said, in essence, is ‘beer is essential, but we are not.’ That’s what they’ve agreed to. We don’t see Catholic priests, Catholic bishops bringing actions to set aside these ridiuculous quarantine directives! As the Church, they have quietly accepted the reduction of the Church to a service provider, no different from any other service provider.
That is an element of this crisis that we have never seen in 2000 years of Church history. Again, my friend John Rao said: Never before, not even the French Revolutionaries and the Russian Revolutionaries could reduce the Church to a non-essential service, and get the Church to voluntarily cease offering the Sacraments everywhere. (…) I can’t see it being anything other than the final stages of the crisis in the Church.
