Essays in Idleness

The lights are going out in our churches this year, all over the world, as we ready ourselves for a Midnight Mass that has been withdrawn. For unlike any Christmas we remember, the darkness will continue through Christmas morning, and all the holy days ahead; and through the primary Christmas season to Epiphany; through Candlemas, most likely, and then through Lent, to another vacated Easter. States all over have decreed that Christian worship be replaced by worship of the Batflu, as a precursor to the universal lockdown our “progressives” long for, when all human life will be permanently regulated, by them, and made unbearably grim. The Batflu itself will pass away, as every contagion before it, but it is the prospect of a “reset,” in a vast “climate change” bureaucracy, that keeps the shine in their eyes.

That every conceivable human evil may be advanced by methods of social isolation, has been this year’s “breakthrough” rediscovery, and points to its ultimate authorship, Below.

In Ontario, for instance, under a simpleton premier, almost all human interaction is banned, except that of mass-market retailing. Starting on the Feast of Stephen (December 26th), familiar visitors to our households will become liable to fines of up to 100,000 Canadian dollars, and up to one year in gaol.

While such lockdowns have been shown to have no effect whatever on the transmission of viruses already widely disseminated, wherever they have been studied, they are imposed as if they were “science,” by petty, and very sleazy, politicians. In no civilized jurisdiction had they such personal authority. But they are thrilled to discover that they can get away with it; that a public systematically misinformed, and deprived of prompt, decisive legal recourse, will obey their edicts, and thereby submit to enslavement. Throughout history, those willing to be enslaved, have been enslaved.

In Christendom, through the centuries, freedom was associated with Jesus Christ. It is no coincidence that our current batch of godless, sordid tyrants close the churches, but not the crowded “big box” stores; demanding that small and family businesses be crushed, thus expanding the market for “Amazon” and the other monsters of Big Tech. Freedom is thus abrogated by means of both “socialism,” and “monopoly capital.”

I write this in explicit reply to some of my (often otherwise kindly) correspondents, who now criticize me for being “too dark.” (Yet I do try to err on the side of smileyface, sometimes.)

Many others have written to ask for my advice. “You tell us to defy our persecutors, but when we go to a Catholic church, we find that it is closed, and there is no Mass to go to.” I don’t know what to recommend, to fellow Catholics abandoned by their Church.

Indeed, our Church has been descending into depravity for some time. The worst of it is priests who themselves do not understand what the Church IS, and are shielded by their bishops. They think of the Church as if she were a civil corporation, bound only by the rules of “organization men.” But the organization that was founded and is sustained by Christ, is not of this nature. She is rather a mystical body — once far from invisible — with clerics meant to serve her, not serve themselves.

If the light of Christmas does not come through them, Christ will find ways around them. The Hope that comes from Our Saviour is not something they can turn spigot-like on and off. If we cannot reach His Presence in His churches, then we must go underground, and sometimes suffer martyrdoms, even at the hands of fellow churchmen, for His sake. But in the face of Eternity, this is a minor inconvenience.

The Church herself will eventually join us, underground; leaving a desiccated husk on the surface, to be scattered by the winds. Christ will retrieve His Church, because, for all the betrayals, Christ abides.