Essays in Idleness

Picture this scene. My correspondent is reporting from what I call Funcouver, in Brutish Columbia, but I have heard of something similar in Toronto.

A private baptism is being celebrated, on a Massless Sunday in Advent. There are eight people in the large church: the priest, an assistant, and six immediate family. Less immediate family and friends were told to stay away, in obedience to the Batflu Regulations. No singing allowed; everyone sanitized and bat-muzzled. It’s not like a Costco or a Walmart, where hundreds are permitted to spread their germs, while pressing towards the cashpoints. (God save them.) There is music, there: Christmas shopping music, piped in.

Suddenly a ninth person enters this church, running towards the Sanctuary. She is shrieking, and hysterical. She suspected something was going on in the church, and lo, something was. She demands that it be stopped right away. “You are killing people!” she shouts, while vapouring in their faces.

Why bother explaining the Regulations to her? She won’t hear. The woman is obviously batshit insane. But as a representative member of the “Covid-concerned” public, she will have to be accommodated, somehow.

Perhaps the doors could be locked, as they will be at my parish church, to keep the unwanted out, including the parish congregation, for the duration of — today’s item — a small private funeral.

As I’ve argued before, the Catholic Church has made a very foolish, catastrophic mistake, by bending over to the Batflu Stasi. She should have behaved more like that hysterical woman: “How dare you try this on!”

For the anti-Catholic bigots, including those in civil authority, are enjoying their power through the “crisis”; and those with an elementary understanding of human nature, know that they will prolong it, indefinitely if they can. They have now shown their hand, definitively. They will order lockdowns and muzzles in all future public health “crises,” and more imaginative commands, when they think of them. Their pet epidemiologists will oblige.

Not the Catholic Church alone, but everybody, should be responding with civil disobedience. (Why let Antifa have all the fun?) For it is a responsibility, indeed a solemn duty, to refuse cooperation with tyranny and evil. Surrendering to it should never have been an option.

By leaving this so late, we are going to have a mess, and possibly a violent one. For the civil authorities — the bureaucratic swamp, ever more filling with Left and Progressive sludge — have once again discovered that they can sucker the general public efficiently, through fear.

If they told the sheeple to “Vote Communist,” it would never work. But scare them with Plague stories and fantasies through Mass Media — lies, damned lies, and statistics — and they fall obsequiously into line.

Better still: they will do your work for you.