Make no mistake about it, this is a pandemic turning point. Pope Francis is on pilgrimage to Iraq. There are large crowds at his venues. The photo above at a church that is packed in Mosul with no evident social distancing and most not wearing a mask or not wearing it properly. The pope is not wearing a mask here and afterwards is greeted with many maskless people. The church is so packed the children are sitting in the aisles.
I think this pope has finally realized that the pandemic is being used by powerful political forces to take human rights away and to limit the freedom of religion. The fear mongering of the left has created so many phobias for rank and file citizens. Finally the pope is pushing back as are the governors of Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Connecticut and other places. More to follow.
Keep in mind, Iraqi Catholics and other minorities there have had to live with the threat of instant martyrdom at any moment by Isis and other Islamic radicals without the press raising any alarm and often not reporting it. They are courageous not only with the threat of very real martyrdom for their Faith but also now with the pandemic which will not rule their lives or their deaths. They are courageous first century like Christians so lacking in so many in the comfortable west.
32 comments:
Please provide some evidence that “powerful forces” are using the pandemic to limit freedom of religion. Isn’t 500,000 deaths good enough for you? Conspiracy theories — like the so-called “election fraud” — put lives at risk, but you seem to bite every time. And yet you post a picture of yourself getting the vaccine. So you’re taking good care of yourself. The very definition of hypocrisy.
Be clear and less hypocritical, your problem is with the Holy Father, not me, just like the New York Times has a problem with the Holy Father going to Iraq. Do your homework and learn that God gives life and he takes it, Blessed be the Lord. Those who die in the Lord, life is changed not ended. Jesus' kingdom is not of this world. The Christian Iraqis know these truths having had to live with the possibility of sudden and gruesome deaths at any moment. They are our role models in this pandemic, not you or those who think like you. The Holy Father knows that too! Praised be Jesus Christ.
Be clear, health is a gift and is to be treasured and protected. "God gives life and he takes it" cannot be used a cavalier excuse for acting in ways that threaten health.
"God gives life and he takes it" doesn't mean a person can engage in drunk driving, can jump out of an airplane without a parachute, or that a surgeon can go into a surgical suite without appropriate antiseptic practices.
The comparison you make between those who live in fear "sudden death" and the minimal expectation that you will wear a mask and wash your hands and maintain social distancing is a grotesque false equivalency. These practices do not, in any way, threaten "sudden death" to those who practice them.
Anonymous at 7:17,
You are like our cowardly bishops. Here is what they said about the Dem covid relief bill:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on Friday condemning taxpayer-funded abortions in the COVID relief plan.
You voted for this, many of these bishops voted for this, and now they're complaining. They know what they can do, but they won't: Excommunicate Biden, Pelosi and the band of fake Catholics in CONgress who voted for this. Time for talk is over, it is long past time for action. And they wonder why people continue to walk away from the Church. Their lack of action on a point they say is vital certainly would not inspire me to convert to Catholicism
Yes, let’s change the subject & wrap yourself in the Holy Father (speaking of hypocritical). You did not answer the question because you have no answer. Stop spreading hate, ignorance and conspiracy theories. Lies kill.
Conspiracy theories are balm for the simple-minded. They help explain the inexplicable. Why would God send a plague that kills millions worldwide? Well, he didn't, of course. But the conspiracy theorist tells us that it's the aliens or the Chinese or the Jews or Bill Gates. And the simple-minded swallow it and spread it. If you come to this blog, you have a pretty good idea what you're getting.
All the passion that the political left promotes about masks and washinig hands if only that would be applied to the real tragedy in this country and around the world as it concerns the millions upon millions of infants murdered legally in abortion to include the gruesome partial birth abortion. Excuse me while I completely ignore those screaming about covid-19 who voted for a candidate who promotes this. That's hypocrisy to say the least and then they will say it is to promote the health of women as though it is permissible to kill an innocent human being to do so.
I stand by my Holy Father in Iraq today and the example he and the overflowing congregation gave to the world. You can call him a hypocrite all you like and say like the New York Times (a democrat operative) that he's a super-spreader with complete disregard for life.
Such calumny direct to the pope through me as the smoke screen.
Yes, now let's divert again! Masks, sanitizing hands, and social distancing have zero to do with abortion, but let's talk about ABORTION because that diverts attention from your false equivalency.
It doesn't work, Good Father. As Anon 9:11 says, you wrap yourself in the Holy Father because you can't defend your position without such diversions.
The average American — and by that, I mean working people who are not immigrants, not prison inmates and not drug users — probably doesn’t know anybody who’s had COVID, let alone died from it. It’s is largely a creation of the media, which is to say the same people who’ve been pulling strings for centuries. Ask yourself who’s getting rich off this pandemic? Then as President Trump says, follow the money!
COVID is real and I suspect most Americans do know several people who have had it if they do not know someone personally who has died they almost certainly know someone secondarily, i.e. friend of a friend, who has died. Even so, I agree with Fr. McDonald that it is being used as a training ground for control of the populace. People have become skeptical of science by bad practice of leadership whose goal has been power and control rather than teaching and helping people become more independent.
Covid - with a 99.5 percent survival rate has been used by leftwing loons to control the masses. Most people I know who have tested positive for covid had fairly mild symptoms and no one was hospitalized. Strange these lefty control freaks have no problem with Biden flooding the US with illegal aliens. That fact in and of itself should make you skeptical
Every day, I thank the Lord for Father McDonald’s sole but mighty rhetorical gift, which is to twist any and all discussions toward abortion in a feeble but sincere effort to justify the Republican Party and its golden messiah.
For example:
Real World:,COVID is real and should be taken seriogg if sky.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Real World: Global warming is the real deal.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Real World: Trump committed treason and sedition and incited a deadly riot.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Real World: Trump admitted assaulting dozens of women.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Real World: Trump put kids in cages, separated immigrant families, encouraged racists and anti-Semites.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Real World: LeBron is the greatest.
Fr. M: But abortion!
Ok, i made up the last one. But as conservative Catholics, isn’t it great to have an intellectual get-out-of-jail card. It means you never have to understand issues, study history, cite evidence or respond to uncomfortable questions. All arguments can be ended with a single word. Trump! I mean, abortion!
"The folks that took their kids to a mask burning today should take them tomorow to visit a refrigerated truck stacked with bodies just to round out the experience. Maybe let 'em listen in on a Zoom call as someone says goodbye to their loved one before they die alone in a hospital room."
As for knowing someone who died, there are 330,000,000 people in the USA. 525,000 have died of Covid. That's one for every 628 people. 29,000,000 have had Covid. That's one in every eleven people. Yeah, everyone knows someone who has had Covid. And, yeah, most of us have known someone who died.
Roe v. Wade was the best thing ever to happen to Catholic conservatives. It allows them to ignore 2,000 years of Church social-teaching, which, of course, they were doing anyway.
Anonymous K at 6:07 PM,
Social Justice demands a right to be born. Roe v Wade was a great ruling because it exposed the depravity of the liberal frauds in the clergy and laity. Thanks for reminding me
I don’t think powerful forces wanted to take away our religious freedom. I think it was about controlling a pandemic and trying to avoid a public health crisis. I do think mistakes were made, but I think the focus was on COVID. Why? It’s simple. Most Masses today are practically a DNC convention. Liberal politics and liberal Masses. I eagerly awaiting the return to a normal Mass schedule because this absence of Mass has been devastating personally.
I read a great article at quadrant.org.au that I can recommend:
“The Futility of the Great Lockdown Melodrama” - Peter Murphy
“In the third week of March 2020, the world lost its equilibrium. It went into a collective nervous breakdown in response to the ‘novel’ coronavirus. Only now is the world starting to recover its composure. Over-reaction dominated the mood of 2020. Government, media, political and academic classes all catastrophised. Yet reality was anything but catastrophic. In 2020 the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 was 0.028 per cent of the world’s population. That is smaller than than the 0.031 per cent of the global population estimated as excess deaths due to the H2N2 flu virus in 1957-1958. In 1918-19, 1.1 to 2.75 per cent of the world’s population died from the ‘Spanish Flu’, which targeted the young. Worldwide 2.2 million persons had deaths attributed to Covid in 2020 compared to the 57 million who died from all causes in 2019.”
“....there is no correlation between the levels of national morbidity in 2020 and the stringency of government restrictions and shutdowns....”
“.......there is no evidence of systemic government efficacy in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. And how could there be? A virus can be transmitted through potentially and of the millions and billions of micro-interactions between persons daily. Government ‘control’ of that is inherently as vain an aspiration as that of the old Soviet economic planners who sought to expand an economy by centrally planning all economic transactions, something that was absurd. The planning instinct again rose to the fore in 2020 and the results were similarly meagre. The feeling that ‘government can fix the problem’ is never far from the service in modern societies. This is a kind of false-hope voluntarism. It can’t deliver what it promises on a large scale and it usually results in a series of bad intended consequences.”
Peter Murphy, Quadrant.
“.......2020 saw a great revival of the health religion, this time in a secular anxiety-driven form. This was most notable of all in Britain where we saw the re-emergence of a kind of state worship that we have not seen since the totalitarian era of the 1930s. In Boris Johnson’s Britain, the health religion took the form of an officially sponsored veneration of the National Health Service (NHS). This was a substitute for the country’s much diminished state church, the Church of England. A cult of sublimity replaced what once had been a religion of beauty. The orchestrated public reverence for the NHS saw doctors treated as priests, nurses as angels and hospitals as church-like proxies.”
Let me restate the question more strongly and crisply:
Why isn’t it also hypocritical for someone to seek the adoption of a body of law that protects human life by prohibiting the practice of abortion yet oppose a body of law that protects human life by mandating reasonable public health measures like wearing a mask?
And if the answer is that such measures do not protect life, for some strong evidence to the contrary, see:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm
Anonymous @ 6.07,
What an inaccurate, unfair and bizarre sweeping statement!
Daniel, 50 million babies have died since 1973 and today it is about 6 to 7 hundred thousand a year. The difference in the number of deaths from Covid, over a half million now and abortion is that one is a illness and the other murder, an act of God compared to a gruesome act of man. For you as a Catholic or any person of good will to be so non chalent about the gruesome statistics of the murder of over 50 million people senselessly is beyond comprehension.
Anonymous at 5:06 AM,
And what about the inaccurate, unfair and bizarre sweeping statement at 6:07 PM? Do you think, at all?
Anonymous 2,
Instead of stating it crisply, your statement is intellectual mush. Joseph Goebbels would be proud
Cancer is an "act of God." Do we suspend all research into finding a cure since it is an "act of God?"
Or should we, therefore, simply say, "Oh well, if Grandma gets sick and dies from the coronavirus because I, her grandson, acted selfishly and did nothing to prevent my getting the virus and then I passed it on to her?"
We should avoid nonchalance in either case and do what is necessary to 1) defeat cancer, and 2) limit the spread of the coronavirus. This would be an act of justice, giving to the other, Grandma or the person with cancer, what he/she is owed.
Daniel, you are not wrong.
I wish, oh how I wish, no, I now pray, that you will take your logic applied to a contagion and has killed a half million people and apply it to abortion which kills far more each year and now over 50 million. MAKE ABORTION ILLEGAL AND IN ALL CASES! Are you in favor of that too or are you a hypocrite?
Daniel is a lefty spouting lefty talking points and whose morality extends only to one side of the political spectrum. Daniel has zero concerns about Kennedy, Clinton, Cuomo or Biden immorality, and of course, he will never mention how President Trump brought relative peace to the Mideast. He fails to mention that it was the Obama administration that put the little kids in cages (remember the media's epic fail showing photos of the kids in cages to only find out they were taken when Obama was president) and Biden is doing it again and is going against the "science" by flooding the US with illegal aliens who have covid and refusing to test them for covid. Daniel sounds like a latter day Joseph Goebbels to me
Cancer... BUT ABORTION!
Seat Belts ... BUT ABORTION!
Air bag ... BUT ABORTION!
Wearing masks... BUT ABORTION!
At least - the the very least - you are predictable.
If the Shoah were ongoing even now you are damn right I would include it and abortion. Abortion is an ongoing plague and yes I am right and you are morally incapacitated. If the Dhoah were on going would you make the same silly comparisons??????
The Shoah . . . ABORTION!
(Keep going there, Padre, you'l on a roll.)
Anonymous TJM at 8:28 a.m.:
It doesn’t get much mushier intellectually than making conclusory statements with no supportive argument or reasoning. And a fanatical Trump worshiper referring to Joseph Goebbels is just yet another instance of projection.
So, please desist from the Goebbeldygook and engage in some real, adult conversation.
Anon 2 - You "Faculty Lounge Lizard," you...
TJM is impervious to reason and facts. As much as people like you and I and most everyone else who posts here know that these things matter, TJM does not. I would go so far as to say TJM cannot understand the importance of reason and facts.
His condition may be due to an age-related decline in mental capacity or to unresolved anger issues with (choose one) A. The Church, B. A Family Member, C. A Former Employer, D. His Accountant, E. The Blue SKy, F. Some Combination Thereof.
Or, he may just be a crank who has nothing better to do than to yell "Get Off My Lawn" at passers by. Sad, in any case.
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