Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent for Catholics around the world.  On this day, priests smear ashes on millions of foreheads while uttering some version of the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."  Perhaps this year the ritual should be reversed, with the faithful lining up to administer ashes to priests and bishops until their white surplices are covered with an unmistakable reminder of their own mortality.

Everywhere today there are hopeful signs that the political revolution traveling under the guise of COVID-19 may be faltering, but the shockwaves it sent through the Church are still reverberating and slowly widening, two years after the fact.  The opening salvos of this revolution still echo in these five words:

The bishops closed the churches.

Let that sentence wash over you slowly, and you may begin to grasp its enduring significance.  Not since Judas Iscariot traded the body of Christ for thirty pieces of silver has there been a more stark betrayal than the bishops trading the Kingdom of Heaven for the kingdom of "run for your lives!"  In some places such as Britain, frightened bishops quietly urged the government to "compel" them to close the churches. In other dioceses, including many in the United States, credulous bishops embraced every irrational, soul-destroying directive that sprang from the fevered imaginations of leftist technocrats without so much as a fig leaf of resistance, as if the Gospel for which the martyrs fought and died gave them no power or authority to do otherwise.

To understand the scope of the damage that has been done to the Church, let's begin with a thought experiment.  Assume you are given the power and the choice to save the soul of only one person from an eternity in Hell, but to do so, you must make martyrs and saints of every man, woman, and child now living on the face of the Earth.  How would you choose?  Assuming that every life lost would rise to glory in Heaven, would you calculate the value of saving one person from Hell to exceed the value of all the days and years of life on Earth lost to the billions whose earthly lives would be cut short?  Would billions and billions of days of life on earth, and all the joy and wonder and happiness they would surely contain, be worth one soul lost to an eternity in Hell?

To many people, this will seem a preposterous question, because most of us cannot fathom eternity and don't believe in Hell. But the Church does — or at least it did until around March 2020.  It was then that the Church made the wrong calculation: that prolonging our time on earth by even a few days or years (a goal that lockdowns spectacularly failed to accomplish) was worth the souls that would be lost and the long-term damage to the faith that would result from denying millions of people the sacraments as they watched their shepherds flee in a time of widespread fear. 

Incredibly, the subversion of the eternal for the temporal continues to this day in some dioceses, with the Vatican leading the way in excluding unvaccinated faithful Catholics from Mass, keeping the "unclean" outside the gates for a few more days of life on Earth for the privileged caste within.  The depravity of this thinking is clear from a question so obvious that Christ asks it of us rhetorically: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36).

In many dioceses in America, a disgusting Hunger Games mentality seized the Church, which for more than a year invited parishioners to compete against each other for coveted reservations of limited seats at Mass.  Pastors deployed marketing strategies urging parishioners to beat the rush and sign up early, the better to elbow their way ahead of the next chap for a spot in the pew.  One is left to wonder what part of "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" these people do not understand. 

Clearly, the bishops have lost the plot, yet is it really any wonder?  Long bereft of the robust masculinity of Saints Peter and Paul, they are, with rare exceptions, an effete and fearful bunch, hewing to comfort and fleeing from controversy, entirely lacking the manly zeal with which Christ drove the moneychangers from the temple.  Yet only a few faithful priests have found the courage to say so.  Most continue to deliver homilies with glassy-eyed denial, as if it were still 1985 and the pillars of Christendom were not crashing down around them.

There is a reason why St. Paul admonished early Christians not to "forsak[e] the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is" at a time in history when following that advice posed a risk of violence far more deadly than a week of flu-like symptoms for most healthy people under 80 (Heb. 10:25).  Christ promised that "where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them" (Matt. 18:20).  Fellowship of the faithful is fellowship with Christ.  To ban that fellowship is to banish Christ from our midst.

The bishops would do well to remember that Jesus, who in his sacred, healing hands possessed a vaccine more powerful than anything man can devise, did not use his time on Earth to establish a Ministry of Health and Safety.  Though he certainly could have done so, he did not set out to achieve a "zero-COVID" policy by completely eradicating all illness in the whole of Palestine, much less the wider world.  He had more important work to do.  As the Gospel tells us, Christ performed signs and wonders not primarily for the fleeting benefit of people's physical health, but to direct their attention to heaven.

Every person Christ healed eventually died.  Every blind man who received the gift of sight eventually lost it in death.  Every lame man whom Christ commanded to walk one day walked no more.  Christ performed these miracles so the people seeing them might believe he was sent by God, and by believing have eternal life — not through the health of their bodies, but through the salvation of their souls. 

Satan confronted Christ in the wilderness by offering him the chance to rule over an earthly kingdom in which he could bring healing not just to the sick and dying of Palestine, but to people throughout the world.  This is something Christ in his compassion surely wanted and, we are told, was tempted to do.  But Satan's price was our hope of heaven, and that was a price that Christ refused to pay.  The bishops, on the other hand, stand ready and eager to take Satan up on the offer. 

Out of cowardice and fear, the bishops endangered the eternal hopes of millions in exchange for a false hope of physical safety.  Yet as with all of Satan's lies, the promised benefit never lives up to the hype.  The apple turns sour.  The booze wears off, the high fades, youth and beauty flee, money, sex, and fame can't buy us happiness, and the lie turns to ashes in our mouths.

So it will be and so, in fact, it has already become, with the false promise of physical salvation through church closures, masks, social distancing, and now passports for "vaccines" that don't vaccinate.  The bishops in the end, like Judas, will not receive the benefit of their bargain.  They will have added no days to their lives or anyone else's, but they will have carelessly driven a great many souls to apostasy, isolation, loneliness, and despair.

I was in Nashville last year when it came time to go to confession, right before Easter.  The Catholic church in a little town just outside the city looked like some sort of bazaar celebrating a festival called "COVID."  There were signs everywhere talking about COVID, telling us to stay away from each other, and shaming us all to hide our faces.  COVID was the first, barely discernible word out of the lector's mask-covered mouth at the start of Mass.  When you went on the parish website, announcements about all that they were doing to save people from COVID obscured every clue that this might also be a place having to do with saving souls.

First up in the litany of sins when I made my confession was my anger and despair over the Church's response to the pandemic.  The young priest who heard my confession (and who was clearly unpracticed in diocesan politics) responded with a frankness that took me aback: "I'm sorry we betrayed you," he said.  It was a confession within a confession, and a beautiful thing to hear, but afterward, it occurred to me that it needed to be spoken to the entire congregation.

I rather doubt that any prelate would appreciate a young curate telling his flock that their bishop has "betrayed" them.  Yet that kind of public confession in every parish by every priest and bishop, followed by a vow never again to bar the doors of the Church or impede anyone who might care to pass through them, is exactly what is needed in this season of Lent for the Church to rise again.

Image via Piqsels.