The State of Our Freedom, The Content of Our Character

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington, D.C., August 28,1963

Character matters, so may it not come up short as the world watches what America does with our hard-won freedoms in this age of discontent. What becomes of them determines what becomes of us. Character matters for me, too, but sometimes there is just no way to retain it except by writing the bare-knuckled truth. I admit that, like most priests in America, I fear the repercussions, but there is just no safe, politically correct way to write what I must now write.

There had been a decades-long progression of examples reflecting patently dishonest character and leadership in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. When Archbishop Wilton Gregory succeeded Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who in turn succeeded Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of Archbishop Gregory’s first messages to his people was, “I will always tell you the truth.”

In light of that promise of transparency, what a disappointment the downward slide has been. In “The Death of George Floyd: Breaking News and Broken Trust,” I wrote of a visit by President Donald Trump to the Saint John Paul II Shrine in Washington. After the visit, Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory stated that he learned of the visit only on the night before, adding:

“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree… Saint John Paul II was an ardent defender of the rights and dignity of human beings. His legacy bears vivid witness to that truth.”

Many now find it far more baffling and reprehensible that Archbishop Gregory would so blatantly mischaracterize the long-planned purpose of the President’s visit and snub it with both his absence and his disdain. It turns out that the Archbishop did know of the visit. He was invited by the White House to participate in it, but declined the invitation to be with the President due to a “previous commitment.”

Archbishop Gregory should also have been well aware of what took place before and during the President’s appearance at the Saint John Paul II Shrine on the 2nd of June, 2020. Its significance was spelled out in “A Big Step for Religious Freedom,” (June 12, 2020) a Wall Street Journal  editorial by Nina Shea, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute who served as a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom:

“[I]n a rare ray of light this dark spring, America’s defining right has been recognized at the highest level as a ‘moral and national security imperative.’ This is more than a symbolic gesture. On June 2, President Trump signed an executive order that declares support for religious freedom a foreign policy ‘priority.’ It mandates that ‘the United States will respect and vigorously promote this freedom’ abroad… The Trump administration has elevated the cause of religious freedom since the president came into office.”

Ms. Shea refers to Religious Liberty as “America’s defining right,” highlighting its importance as the most fundamental of our freedoms. It is President Trump’s emphasis on this right that Archbishop Wilton Gregory dismissed as “reprehensible,” and denigrated its culmination in a presidential visit to the Saint John Paul II Shrine as a “Catholic facility [that] would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated” for a partisan political purpose.

Nina Shea writes in the WSJ  that the President’s executive order puts teeth in the International Religious Freedom Act’s listing of severe religious persecution in countries like Nigeria and China, notorious for their suppression of religious freedoms. The order allocates funding for programs that protect religious rights in communities abroad through economic sanctions and other measures against oppressive governments.

Wading in the Washington Swamp

It would be informative to know whether Archbishop Gregory objected when President Barack Obama received an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame ignoring his global promotion of abortion. To dismiss President Trump’s visit to the Saint John Paul II Shrine as “reprehensible” is… well… reprehensible. In a recent comment on These Stone Walls, a reader from Texas expressed a widely felt dismay:

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Archbishop Gregory denigrated the visit by President Trump to the Saint John Paul II Shrine. Turns out the Archbishop was invited to be with Trump but declined. This after he claimed to not have known about the visit. What an embarrassment!”

The drama in Washington became more mysterious six days later. At a time when the Archdiocese was still under a ban from public Masses and an order to maintain social distancing, priests of the Archdiocese received a highly unusual June 8 email from the Chancery Office. They were asked to participate in a protest in front of the White House.

The email specifically asked that the priests wear a cassock or black clerical clothing along with a mask. It instructed them to bring protest placards. Several priests of the Archdiocese said they were surprised by this given the volatile atmosphere of the protests descending into riots at that time and the fact that priests of the Archdiocese were still under a conflicting order to maintain social distancing and refrain from any gatherings related to their ministry.

Two priests spoke with the Catholic News Agency  on condition of anonymity because they, too, feared repercussions from the Archdiocese. So much for religious freedom and freedom of speech. The priests told the Catholic News Agency:

“We have been told for weeks that we cannot meet in groups of the faithful, open our churches, serve in our parishes. Now they want us to take to the streets.”

Other priests objected that media photographs of them in clerical garb protesting in front of the White House had the appearance of doing exactly what Archbishop Gregory accused President Trump of doing: creating a photo opportunity for partisan political purposes “manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles which call us to defend the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree.”

Was there any reason to believe that the rights of priests would be protected against media criticism of such a clerical protest? Archbishop Wilton Gregory was no champion for the rights of his priests. As President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, Archbishop Gregory extended invitations to SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to address the Bishops’ Dallas conference representing the voices of victims.

SNAP director, David Clohessy, and founder, Barbara Blame offered emotional, but highly contrived testimony while bishops tripped over each other to get their tears on camera. There was no rebuttal except that propounded by Cardinal Avery Dulles who opposed the Dallas Charter in “The Rights of Accused Priests.”

The objections of Cardinal Dulles were ignored. Under the leadership and direction of Archbishop Gregory, the standard employed for removing accused priests from ministry was the lowest standard possible. If an accusation is “credible” on it’s face — meaning only that it cannot be immediately disproven — then the cleric is out forever or until he is indisputably able to prove his innocence. In First Things magazine, a shocked Father Richard John Neuhaus described the end result:

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“Zero Tolerance. One strike and you’re out. Boot them out of ministry. Our bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting in the Dallas Charter a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and unCatholic approach to sin and grace. They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Scandal Time, 2002

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“Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest?”

One of the main developers and proponents of that standard was also one of Archbishop Gregory’s predecessors in Washington, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick whose own history is about to be published in a soon-to-be-released Vatican report. SNAP and its director, David Clohessy, were also later accused of extensive corruption in a lawsuit from a SNAP employee reported by Bill Donohue and the Catholic League in “SNAP Exposed” and by me in “David Clohessy Resigns SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”

In the 12 Century, Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the King, excommunicated some of the corrupt barons of King Henry II after they summarily executed two accused priests. The King raged at Becket’s affront to his authority saying, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Four of the King’s men, taking that as a directive, murdered the archbishop at Mass in his cathedral on December 29, 1170. In the end, King Henry had to accede to canon law and the jurisdiction of church courts over clergy. As for Becket, he became a saint and martyr canonized in 1173.

It pains me greatly that an organization I deeply respect, the Becket Law firm, defenders of religious liberty taking its name from the legacy of Saint Thomas à Becket, published a defense of “credibly accused” as sufficient for denying the civil rights of Catholic priests, but no one else. Maria Montserrat Alvarado wrote on behalf of the Becket Law firm:

“In ‘Diocese of Lubbock v. Guerrero,’ the plaintiff, a Catholic clergyman, sued for defamation after the Diocese of Lubbock included him on a list of credibly accused clergy. The lower courts sided with Guerrero [saying] that because the Diocese published the information that could be seen… outside the confines of the church [it] could be used to sue the Church… The lower court’s strange view runs counter to Pope Francis and USCCB’s specific call for greater transparency”

The above was posted by Becket Law on Twitter, but These Stone Walls does not have the reach that the Becket Law firm has. My rebuttal was but a mere whisper, posted nonetheless, so maybe you can make it a bit louder by sharing this post:

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“I must register my objection and grave disappointment with Becket Law for statements about the defamation lawsuit by a priest whose name appears on his bishop’s list of the ‘credibly accused.’ Becket’s website cites Pope Francis in a call for transparency. Pope Francis also said in 2019 that the names of accused priests should only be published if the accusations are proven. The U.S. bishops adopted a ‘credible’ standard that does not even come close to that. It is of deep concern that Becket Law appears to either not know this or not care… for the great damage done by this practice.” (See “The Credibility of Bishops on Credibly Accused Priests”)

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For over a decade on These Stone Walls, I have warned against the practice of bishops citing a false and unjust “transparency” as justification for publishing lists of priests who have been merely accused with little to no effort at real substantiation. This is the legacy of the Dallas Charter and “credibly accused.”

It is for good reason that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, reflecting on my own case on NBC’s “Today” show on October 13, 2005 said:

“There is no segment of the American population which has less civil liberties protection than the average American Catholic priest.”

— Catholic League President Bill Donohue

A Dire Threat to Freedom of the Press — from Within

Another grave threat to our freedoms is the diminishment of Freedom of the Press by stewards not quite up to the task. Most people who read newspapers have seen the term, “op-ed,” but few know its true origin. It began as a feature of The New York Times  once America’s most respected flagship newspaper but now slowly collapsing under the weight of its own hubris. “Op-ed” was newspeak for “Opposite the Editorial Page.”

Its meaning was both literal and figurative. It was a feature by a guest writer invited by the Times for an opinion piece that would appear on the page opposite the newspaper’s own main editorial page. Over time, it also came to be symbolic of the Times’ commitment to integrity in journalism. The “op-ed” also provided a forum in which writers could reflect positions that were opposite of those the editors propounded on their editorial page. Thus, “op-ed” came to have a double meaning.

The old liberal order for which The New York Times  and other newspapers became a sometimes honorable mouthpiece has given way to a more radical form of liberalism and what today is manipulated as news coverage. Along with its rise, two of America’s signature freedoms, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech, have fallen.

The most recent evidence for that is something that just happened in the editorial offices of two formerly liberal newspapers, The New York Times  and the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the Times, a revolution has occurred in the newsroom when Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, wrote an op-ed defending President Donald Trump’s statement that the 1807 Insurrection Act could be invoked to call upon the military to quell rioting and massive destruction in our cities.

Senator Cotton alluded (as did I in these pages in recent weeks) that Democrat President Lyndon Johnson summoned the military to quell riots following the 1968 assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. And Republican President George H.W. Bush also invoked the Insurrection Act to call for military intervention against 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of four L.A.P.D. officers who brutally beat Rodney King. Today, the progressively manipulated media wants us to believe that this was an original but unconstitutional idea of President Trump.

A Wall Street Journal  editorial referred to the Times  reporters as “social justice warriors” who ransacked an opinion piece by Senator Cotton because it expressed a view that “millions of Americans support if the police cannot handle the rioting and violence.” As a result of the Times  reporters’ rebellion and rage over allowing such views in public view, The New York Times  demurred and accepted its Editorial Page editor’s resignation.

The once honorable concept of the “op-ed” is now dead, murdered by activist reporters whose politics now take precedence over the news. The long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer  was also pushed out because that newspapers’ own activist reporters revolted over an opinion piece headline, “Buildings Matter, Too” by Architecture Critic, Inga Saffron. It was seen by the reporters as an affront to the “Black Lives Matter” movement and a demand was made to remove it, and remove its author.

This all began unchecked in America’s universities where sensitive ears cannot bear to hear opposing views and college administrators cave as militant protesters scream down conservative voices. I recently had a headline posted on Facebook and Google along with a link to my post, “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek.” The headline was “Eternal Life Matters.” It was seen and “liked” by several readers before being silenced by both Facebook and Google, both of which deny placing limits on conservative viewpoints.

In “I Have a Dream,” The Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous ode to liberty, he included the moving sentence:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

— Rev. Martin Luther King

The great irony for Martin is that his much needed voice would not be heard today had not his very life been forfeit. And the irony for me is that I could not be free to write today had not freedom itself been taken from me.

It is the content of our character that determines the state of our freedom. America is at a tipping point, but it is not too late to save our freedoms from madness. The content of our character is what unites us, not as Black Americans, or White Americans, or Native Americans, but as Americans.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: My late friend, father Richard John Neuhaus, said there are only three things required to address the madness of our time: Fidelity, Fidelity, and Fidelity. I thank you for yours. Please Subscribe to BeyondThese Stone Walls and Follow us on Facebook. You may also like to read and share these related eye-openers:

Hitler’s Pope, Nazi Crimes, and The New York Times

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix

Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover Up Corruption

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is against defunding police departments. He instead wants to disarm police officers who can then “de-escalate things.”

This was to be the post I wrote for These Stone Walls  two weeks ago. Most of America was in the throes of protest and urban riots over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin while other officers passively looked on. To the horror of once-civilized America, life was crushed out of Mr. Floyd with an officer’s knee on his neck in full view of cameras in a nine-minute video. I first covered this story in these pages in “The Death of George Floyd: Breaking News and Broken Trust.”

This threw America into political, social, and moral chaos in the final months of a contentious and volatile presidential election year. This nation was already reeling from a global pandemic that took over 110,000 American lives in a matter of months. As a direct consequence of the pandemic, economic recession choked the life out of businesses and terminated millions of jobs in what had been the strongest economy since World War II. And then the George Floyd injustice happened and millions of Americans who have just “had it” took to the streets.

It also drew the problem of police abuse and other misconduct into the public forum, but not for the first time. Cooler heads will eventually prevail, but as of this writing, movements like the tone deaf “Defund Police” are gaining momentum. You might imagine that behind these stone walls I am surrounded by men who would be right on board with such a movement, but that is not so.

It may seem surprising that some of the “cooler heads” we need to prevail are right here in prison and none of them want to put police out of business. As the Law Clerk in a prison law library, I have fielded hundreds of George Floyd related questions and comments in the recent weeks. Prisoners watch the news. Many compensate for being separated from the world by watching the news relentlessly.

Every prisoner where I live is aware that New Hampshire currently has one prisoner on death row even though the state repealed the death penalty a year ago, and outvoted the governor’s veto of the repeal effort. The one prisoner on death row is an African American man who shot and killed Manchester, New Hampshire police officer, Michael Briggs. Officer Briggs and his assailant were both armed in that Manchester alley.

Officer Briggs’s partner, John Breckinridge, was also there. His description of what took place is a riveting account in which he spoke of his insistence upon the death penalty for Michael Briggs’ killer. Mr. Breckinridge also told the story of how his long road to Catholic reversion led him to Divine Mercy and a reversal of his position on the death penalty in “A Matter of Life and Death” (Parable, Jan/Feb 2014).

From what I have read, I know of the chilling likelihood that two police officers may have died on that night in Manchester, New Hampshire if they were the only ones there who were unarmed. Turning all this into political theater, former Vice President Joe Biden stated his opposition to the “Defund Police” movement. He suggests instead that officers should be disarmed so they can “deescalate things.” No one should take up that hapless solution without first talking to John Breckinridge.

Police Misconduct Takes Many Forms

I have seen no evidence of any glee among prisoners in any of this. Not one has spoken in favor of defunding or in any way diminishing police in our society. On the contrary, few Americans have a more accurate sense of what would happen in this nation without police. Believe it or not, prisoners want their families well protected. Like most, prisoners want crime prevented when possible, investigated when not, and perpetrators prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

They just want it done justly and evenly. They want police who are colorblind, without manipulation or entrapments, without planted evidence, without beatings, without coerced plea deals, without “testilying” or any of the other malfeasance with which some police — but certainly not all — have abused their power without a physical knee on someone’s neck.

Michael Gallagher’s recent TSW  guest post, “A Teacher’s Worst Nightmare,” was an eye-opener for many and a painfully familiar account for me. Too many people believe that protecting the civil rights of those accused of crimes just provides the guilty-accused with an avenue to “get off” on a technicality. But what about the innocent-accused? They exist in greater numbers than most Americans know. Mike Gallagher’s haunting story presents a compelling case for protecting the rights of the accused.

The police misconduct in that case was not as glaring as in the case of George Floyd, but the story leaves no doubt that it was destructive, and not only for Mike Gallagher and his family. The erosion of trust in the American justice system is the most enduring fallout of stories like Mike’s.

Court rulings have upheld the practice of some police to lie to the accused during the investigation of a suspected crime. When teacher Mike Gallagher took and passed a polygraph test, for example, he was told by police that he had failed it miserably. As dirty as the tactic was, it is not technically considered police misconduct because it is not against their rules.

But it was a different story when the police told the District Attorney prosecuting the case that Mike failed the polygraph. The police in that case, as in so many other accusations of child sexual abuse, justified the lie because they presumed from the start that Mike must be guilty.

From that point on, the search for evidence in the case was filtered through a powerful bias in favor of guilt. There are volumes of studies showing how “investigator bias” among police leads to wrongful convictions. When the police officer lied to the District Attorney by stating that Mike failed the polygraph test it could have had only one cause. The police bias was so strong that any evidence to the contrary was suppressed.

As unfortunate as that case was, Mike Gallagher himself is a very fortunate man. The case fell apart of its own accord because an honest District Attorney had doubts and tested them out. If the case remained in the hands of the biased police, Mike would only just about now, some 25 years later, be emerging from prison.

There are many more nefarious examples of police misconduct that lead directly to wrongful convictions. This includes a long list of illegal infractions like withholding exculpatory evidence, inventing fictitious crimes, planting evidence, and the widespread practice of “testilying,” a term police use instead of perjury to describe lying under oath to bolster their case.

Coercive plea bargaining is then used by over-burdened or unethical prosecutors to get a conviction without having any of the above practices exposed and tested in court. Of nearly 80,000 defendants in federal criminal cases in 2018, just two-percent of them went to trial. The other 98-percent were resolved by plea bargains.

In the Southern District of New York in 2018, the plea bargain figure was almost 95-percent. This holds true in almost every jurisdiction in America. The real danger is that innocent defendants will end up spending much longer in prison than guilty defendants who are well motivated to take the deal.

About 25-percent of the DNA exonerations in America involved cases in which innocent defendants were coerced to plead guilty to avoid spending the rest of their lives in prison. This is a practice I wrote about in “Plea Deals or a Life Sentence in the Live Free or Die State.”

Defund Public Sector Unions That Cover-up Corruption

A lot of ink is now being invested in an analysis of what happened to General Michael Flynn. In 2016, he served just 24 days as President Trump’s National Security Advisor before being ensnared in an FBI probe about fictitious Russian collusion now entirely dismantled as a fraud heavily hyped by the get-Trump-at-all-costs media.

General Flynn’s decision to accept a plea deal, which was also a fraud, was coerced with lies and threats from the investigating FBI agents that they would arrest and charge his son. The nation today can agree on only one thing. The FBI used to be better than this, and could be again if and when this whole truth comes out.

In the case of the late George Floyd of Minneapolis, the officer who killed him had 18 prior abuse complaints in his record. They resulted in just two letters of reprimand in his personnel file, a file that is beyond the reach of citizens thanks to the “progressive” city’s collective bargaining with the police union.

One of those cases involved a 2006 case in which Derek Chauvin was one of six officers who fatally shot 42-year-old Wayne Reyes. The prosecuting attorney in the case was Amy Klobuchar who reportedly declined to place the matter before a grand jury for indictments. Ms. Klobuchar is now Senator Klobuchar, a former Democratic presidential candidate and potential running mate for Joe Biden.

In fairness to senator Klobuchar, she explains that she was elected to the U.S. Senate before that case was resolved without prosecution by her successor. She added that she in hindsight believes that using the grand jury to decide prosecution of this and multiple other cases of alleged police misconduct in Minneapolis was a mistake. The point I want to make is that all of this was kept from the public by levels of secrecy secured by the police union.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey exhibited leadership and courage when he stood up to a chanting mob recently in opposition to defunding and disbanding his police department. He was screamed at, taunted, called names, and violently harassed by the mob as he walked through them after courageously stating views considered heresy by the mob. The Minneapolis City Council caved in completely with a call to dismantle their police force.

Even before the protests and riots this year, several other Democrat-controlled “progressive” cities saw marked increases in violent crime. In the first six months of 2020, shootings in Minneapolis had risen 60-percent. In New York City shootings had risen 18-percent; in San Francisco, 19-percent; in Philadelphia, 51-percent. Mr. Biden would have the police as the only unarmed characters in these urban dramas. We all know how that would end.

There were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019. Only three of them involved police. The vast majority of others involved crimes perpetrated by young African Americans upon other young African Americans. This points to a serious problem in American cities, but not necessarily the one CNN and other venues are telling you.

This does not mean racism does not exist. It certainly does, but in my world it is overshadowed by something much more subtle: racial bias. The current President’s appointment of General Charles Q. Brown to be the first African American to serve as Air Force Chief of Staff has raised a discussion about racial bias. It was raised by General Brown himself whose appointment was in the works well before the current racial tension in America. In a brilliant video address on June 5, General Brown stated:

“I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron, or as a senior officer the only African American in the room. I’m thinking about wearing the same flight suit, with the same wings on my chest as my peers, and then being questioned by another military member: ‘Are you a pilot?’ I’m thinking about how some of my comments were perceived to represent the African American perspective when it’s just my perspective…”

— General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., June 5, 2020

[ Editor’s note: please watch the following video for the full context. ]

That such subtle bias still exists in the blind corners of our attitudes should be a cause for soul searching for all Americans. I am proud to be in a nation that can look past such bias and recognize greatness in General Brown. We are a better — and safer — nation for his service.

As for Disarming the Police …

One widely Tweeted solution to police misconduct was this: “Almost every role in our community a police officer fills would be better handled by a social worker.” I asked other prisoners about Mr. Biden’s idea that police should be disarmed, and about the suggestion that police could be replaced by social workers. I never got any straight answers. They could not stop laughing.

The real criminals around me — they are not all real criminals but the real criminals are in the majority — sneer at these suggestions. Then they express worry about their families who still live in the same Blue State broken communities from which their offenses were committed.

But what they sneer at the most is the revelation that the City of Minneapolis received over 2,600 citizen complaints about just a small percentage of abusive police officers since 2015 and took action in only twelve of those cases thanks to the public sector police union’s political clout. If real reform is the real goal of protesters, #DefundPublicSectorUnions, and not #DefundPolice, would be our antiphon to the memory of George Floyd.

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The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

As President Trump called upon governors to classify churches as essential, a Catholic Bishop in a state among the least impacted by Covid-19 suspended public Mass.

I have to write about this now because I wrote about it then. During the now notorious presidential election of 2016, I wrote “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” If you missed it then, you probably should not miss it now. I and many others naively lent credence to all the media hype about Russian collusion back then — now proven to be entirely false and an egregious injustice to General Michael Flynn. The above post actually commended the Russian hackers for providing transparency often promised but rarely delivered by American politicians.

That post was about revelations found in the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, about the Democratic Party’s plans for the Catholic Church in America. I wrote the post just after Mrs. Clinton’s now infamous debate declaration: “Supporters of Donald Trump are a Basket of Deplorables.” I was not one of Donald Trump’s supporters, but I knew that Hillary lost the election then and there. Attacking candidates is just politics as usual. Attacking voters is political suicide.

The post above cited several examples of emails between the Clinton campaign and various Catholic entities with overtures to move the Church from a pro-life agenda toward a more left-leaning script for Catholic social progress. Climate change and open borders are to be the moral imperatives of the day.

I had more or less forgotten about the now famous Basket of Deplorables until the current election raised it anew — though not in so many words. Three years after the term was first
uttered, many in the news media still apply it by inference to everything and everyone in any way connected to the current American President.

Now thrust upon his growing heap of media scorn is a call from the President to America’s governors to give churches and other houses of worship the same treatment some of them have bestowed upon liquor stores, abortion clinics, and beauty salons. This President wants churches to be deemed “essential.” He at first threatened to “override” any governor who balks at this, a notion that the news media has gone to great lengths to ridicule. In a hastily scheduled White House Press Conference, Trump said:

“I call upon the governors to allow our churches or places of worship to open. If they don’t do it, I will override the governors. The ministers, pastors, rabbis, imams and other faith leaders will make sure their congregations are safe as they gather and pray.”

On May 22, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control supplemented the President’s request by laying out a series of guidelines for houses of worship to safely provide services. These include the usual recommendations for social distancing, cleaning practices, and face coverings all of which churches could easily observe.

The Real Presence and the Present Absence

But what do we do when it is Catholic bishops, and not politicians, closing church doors to faithful Catholics? As the American President deemed churches to be essential and called to reopen them, the Catholic Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, one of the states least impacted by the contagion, issued his formal “Decree Establishing Liturgical Norms During Covid-19 Pandemic”:

“Mindful that the dignity of the human person requires the pursuit of the common good (CCC 1926) and as Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester understanding my responsibility to issue liturgical norms by which all are bound (Canon 838:4), I hereby decree [that] the public celebration of Mass remains suspended… until such time as I deem it prudent to modify [this decree].”

There are a multitude of reasons why the ongoing suspension of Catholic Mass in this of all states is an unintended assault upon the religious needs of the people. In a surprising juxtaposition of roles, as some bishops closed churches and barred the faithful from Mass, the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement that should give pause to secular and spiritual leaders alike: “Millions of Americans embrace worship as an essential part of life.”

I would have expected such a sentiment from our bishops, not from a government entity established to control contagion. Sadly, however, that truth professed by the CDC applies less to New Hampshire than any other state. According to the Pew Research Center, New Hampshire is ranked 50th out of the fifty states for religious identity, observance, and influence. It also ranks 50th out of the fifty states in charitable giving.

In publishing his recent Decree, the Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, NH, Bishop Peter A. Libasci, stated that as of May 18, 2020, over 3,600 New Hampshire citizens [out of a population of over 1.3 million] have tested positive for Covid-19, and 172 of our neighbors have lost their lives.” This is true, and at this writing the death toll in New Hampshire stands at about 250. Tragically, all but 65 of them were residents of nursing homes, the most vulnerable among us but they would not have been present at Mass anyway. These figures pale next to how Covid-19 has impacted some other states where governors and bishops are reopening churches while applying the norms for safety recommended by the CDC.

But there is another New Hampshire statistic that should be far more alarming to both the Governor and the Bishop. Among the fifty states, New Hampshire has the nation’s highest and most hopeless rate of death among working age young adults between the ages of 16 and 40. This is driven by another, far more deadly contagion: opiate addiction and all the physical, mental and spiritual hopelessness it entails. I wrote about this Grim Reaper in “America’s Opioid Epidemic Is Wreaking Havoc in this Prison.”

That post described a wall of sorrows in one unit in this prison containing the photos of young men who have lost their lives to addiction after leaving prison. The 37 photos on that wall of death included only those who lived in this one unit of 288 prisoners. And just as I sat down to type this post, a 38th photo was added. One of our good friends just tragically ended up on that wall.

Jerry came to prison at age 19 in 2005. In recent years, he attended Sunday Mass with Pornchai Moontri and me. Before the Covid-19 shut down he was able to come and talk to me in the prison Law Library where I work. On Friday, May 15, 2020 he was released from prison having completed his sentence at age 33. He lived in freedom for only a single day before losing his life to a fentanyl overdose. This is a painfully familiar story here as young prisoners face the reality that life in freedom sometimes means bringing the bondage of addiction home with them.

Bishop Libasci’s Decree cited his justification for keeping the churches closed: “172 of our neighbors have lost their lives” to Covid-19 statewide. This pales next to the grim truth of those in his Diocese who lost their lives in hopeless addiction. The New Hampshire Chief Medical Examiner reports that 2,500 young lives were lost to opioid drug overdoses in this small state since 2015.

Most of these deaths were those of young men and women from 16 to 40 years of age. One small New Hampshire city recently saw over 400 drug overdose deaths in a single year. There is likely no other state more in need of the spiritual strength and solace of open churches and the Sacrifice of the Mass than New Hampshire.

Trusting Faithful Catholics

One commenter on this subject in a Facebook discussion (which I could not see because I have never seen Facebook) commended Bishop Libasci and other bishops for helping to keep people safe by closing churches. I could only think of a statement of Saint Paul in his letter to the Corinthians:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

— 1 Cor. 13:11

The point should be obvious. When I was seven, I needed the help of adults to take care of myself. At sixty-seven that is simply no longer so. The Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines for what we adults must do to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe in public environments, including at Mass.

This is a point for which conservatives and Libertarians refer to the Left as purveyors of Big Government and “The Nanny State.” And it’s a point for which George Orwell cautioned us all in his dystopian 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. We surrender our freedoms when we hand the interpretation of them over to “Big Brother.” Remember the cautionary words of the late President Ronald Reagan:

“The most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

America is vigilant about concessions to totalitarian governments but too many turn a blind eye to how our political, social, economic, intellectual, and spiritual narratives are dominated in our media by the extreme left of our cultural elite. For someone to make the decision for us by denying Mass to the faithful when they should be entrusted with caring for themselves is insulting, at best.

When that decision leaves faithful Catholics in spiritual deprivation, they are placed at even greater risk by traveling long distances to seek out Mass in a more reasonable Diocese. This point was made by some readers of a recent post of mine. One comment that stands out is this one by “Judith” posted on “Pandemic Lockdown: Before the Walls Close In.”

“Here in the trenches, we recently received a communiqué from the Minister of Compliance in the Department of the State-Sanctioned Religious Observance informing us of the new rules regarding worship. If the Church / State requires masks, reception of Communion after Mass, and taking down our names and contact information in order to attend Mass, I will be assisting at the SSPX Mass an hour-and-forty-minutes away [which happens to be in Bishop Libasci’s diocese]. I know for a fact they don’t put up with this… God forbid you exercise your free will by choosing to risk your life to follow the precepts of the Church.”

Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy Seal and one of the most honorable members of Congress, wrote a March 19, 2020 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Why Does Reopening Polarize Us?” He raises an interesting twist of political psychology. Liberal and conservative brain functioning shows differences in their mapping when risk-taking is considered.

But it is now the conservatives who “are the ones ready to confront risk head-on.” He says this is also consistent with his experience in the military, and may explain why the vast majority of Special Forces operatives identify as political and social conservatives. But he cautions that liberals lagging behind in re-opening society may have another agenda, treating the lockdowns and consequent economic devastation as an opportunity to restructure America into a socialist utopia.”

In the National Catholic Register, Thomas M. Farr, President of the Religious Freedom Institute, has a recent column entitled, “Coronavirus and Religious Freedom.” He cites that the line drawn between “essential and nonessential” businesses and services by government decree is highly suspect. He singled out Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, former pediatrician, and notorious proponent of late-term abortion, as declaring that religious services are not essential,” but abortion clinics and liquor stores are.

Thomas Farr also adds that for Catholics, access to the Sacrifice of the Mass is “essential to our happiness in this life and the next.” I can only repeat what Father James Altman so courageously declared in a recent, now viral, homily entitled, “Memo to the Bishops of the World”:

“The faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the Supreme Law of the Church and look after their souls.”

Effective June 6, 2020, Bishop Libasci modified his Decree to allow public Masses to resume in his diocese with strict conditions and limitations in addition to those recommended by the CDC.

Elsewhere, on the topic of faithful priests with courage, Father George David Byers had a memorable quote in a recent post, “Coronavirus ‘Creativity’ for Mass: ‘Just do it in the Parking Lot.’ No. And… Hell no!”

“I’m not going to be a Parking Lot Priest just to look up-to-date. No! … Hell no!”

But I am giving the last word to Saint Paul’s Second letter to Timothy:

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort; be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itchy ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

— 2 Tim 4:1-5

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Priesthood, The Signs of the Times and The Sins of the Times

There is a difference between the signs of the times and the sins of the times. It is required that priests are vigilant of the former but resistant of the latter.

Just days before sitting down to write this post, I was bestowed with the honor of membership in The Catholic Writers Guild. One of my first thoughts as I plugged in my typewriter today is that this might be the post that gets me kicked out. We are in one of the strangest times in the life of the Church and in the ministry of bishops and priests that we have seen in many centuries.

There have been times almost as strange, but the difference is that you were kept from knowing about them.

My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982 at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. It did not start off well. There was another candidate for ordination that year, but he fled just days before. Someone then scrambled to revise and reprint the program for the Mass of Ordination. It was presided over by The Most Reverend Odore Gendron, Bishop of Manchester. That was four bishops ago.

Like most Catholic priests in America, I was ordained on a Saturday afternoon. Unlike most, I was ordained alone. Such a thing became a more prevalent phenomenon, however, as the signs of the times began to reflect the sins of the times. In the 1970s and 1980s, fewer men found the courage for such a counter-cultural commitment as the Catholic priesthood, a response I wrote of in a Pentecost Post, “Inherit the Wind: Pentecost and the Breath of God.”

That post described the story behind the story of the gathering of the Apostles at Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles (1:13) reports that the Eleven — Judas had come to ruin — came to Jerusalem in the company of Mary, Mother of the Resurrected Jesus, to mark the Pilgrimage Feast of Weeks fifty days after the spring celebration described in the Book of Leviticus (23:15-16). Among the Greek-speaking Jews of the New Testament, it came to be called Pentecost for “fiftieth day.”

Pentecost became a Christian feast when the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles in Jerusalem in the form of a mighty wind and tongues of fire. Then almost immediately, the newborn Church saw its first scandal as Peter rose to defend the Apostles against a false accusation that they were all drunk at 9:00 in the morning (Acts 2:15). I took a part of my title, “Inherit the Wind,” for that Pentecost post from a cryptic passage in the Book of Proverbs (11:29): “Those who trouble their household will inherit the wind, and the fool will become a servant to the wise.”

Seminary studies throughout the 1970s and priesthood ordination in 1982 were both such counter-cultural endeavors that I troubled my household greatly when I became a priest. The Proverb came true. Ever since that day, I have been a fool by the standards of this world, and a servant to the wise. Whether I have inherited the wind that so moved the Apostles to evangelize even in the face of martyrdom remains to be seen. I am still here writing.

Though my ordination was 38 years ago, I remember every moment as though it were yesterday. As I lay alone and prostrate on the floor before the altar, the Litany of the Saints was intoned. I had a fleeting thought that my sister, from a pew just 12 feet away, was mentally urging me, “Get up, you fool! Flee!” Later when I asked her about it she confirmed it. “Yes, that was me.”

Thirty-one years later in 2013 Dorothy Rabinowitz was writing “The Trials of Father MacRae,” her third in a series for The Wall Street Journal. She interviewed my sister who spoke candidly with a comment that never made its way into the articles. “The Catholic Church took my brother,” my sister said, “And now look what they have done to him.”

I have written of this in past Ordination Day posts, but many people have since asked me The Big Question. If I knew then what I know now, would I have joined John, the man who was to be ordained with me, in flight from this fate? I answer the question in one of the links at the end.

The Signs of the Times

Back in 2012, Anne Hendershott penned a research study for The Catholic World Report entitled, “Called by Name.” There were some interesting statistics analyzed in the study. In 2010 in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, a region that is 79-percent Catholic, there were no priesthood ordinations.

In the same year in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, a region that is only 17-percent Catholic, there were seven ordinations to the priesthood. In Portland, Oregon, the population of which is only 16-percent Catholic, there were nine ordinations in 2010. Researchers suggested that areas with large Latino populations may have fewer candidates for priesthood.

That turned out to be untrue. In the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas in 2010 there were seven priesthood ordinations and most were Latino. But across the nation in 2010, the number of priesthood ordinations and their ratio to the Catholic population varied greatly. Something less obvious was driving this.

In 1996, then Omaha, Nebraska Archbishop Elden Curtis penned an article entitled “Crisis in Vocations? What Crisis?” He theorized with some compelling data to back it up, that the attitudes and strength of fidelity in Church leadership is the number one causal factor in reduced numbers of viable candidates for priesthood. Archbishop Curtis wrote:

“When dioceses and religious communities are unambiguous about the ordained priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines these calls; when there is strong support for vocations, and a minimum of dissent about the male celibate priesthood and religious life; when there is loyalty to the Magisterium; when the bishops, priests, religious and lay people are united in vocation ministry — then there are documented increases in vocations. Young people do not want to commit themselves to dioceses or communities that permit or simply ignore dissent from Church doctrine”

— Archbishop Elden Curtis

In her article for The Catholic World Report cited above, Anne Hendershott analyzed a study by Andrew Yuengert, a Pepperdine University sociologist, who tried to quantify the observations of Archbishop Curtis about the connection between priesthood vocations and the attitudes and fidelity of Church leaders. He discovered some fascinating corollaries.

Andrew Yuengert found that dioceses with bishops ordained in the 1970s had significantly lower numbers of priesthood vocations than those with bishops ordained before or later. He found that corollary to be most prominent in the ordination statistics of bishops who were characterized as orthodox or progressive. Of interest, he discovered that bishops who regularly published articles in America magazine — considered to be more liberal — fostered fewer vocations than bishops who were more likely to publish articles in The Catholic Answer, considered to be more orthodox.

There was another interesting corollary in the Yuengert study. You may remember the great controversy at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 when then President Barack Obama was invited to give the Commencement Address and was bestowed with an honorary degree.

At the time, eighty-three U.S. bishops signed a formal statement disapproving of the University administration’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on the openly pro-abortion President Obama who worked to expand access to abortion throughout the U.S. and the world. Yuengert discovered in this another unexpected corollary: Many of the 83 bishops who signed that statement led dioceses with the highest percentages of priesthood ordinations in the country.

The Sins of the Times

I have heard many horror stories from priests ordained in the 1970s and 1980s that the seminaries they were sent to were anything but loyal to the Magisterium and supportive of priestly vocations. I have a horror story of my own that I wrote about a decade ago. It is worth repeating because it was typical of the sins of the times in the 1970s and 1980s, the era in which the decline of priesthood was set in motion.

I had requested to go to St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, MA, but was sent instead to Baltimore. This story took place in the fall of 1979 in my second year of theological studies at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore. St. Mary’s was at the time considered to be the most academically challenging and most theologically liberal of U.S. seminaries. It was called “The Harvard of seminaries,” but it also had a reputation for fostering — even demanding — dissent.

There were about 160 seminarians from some 40 U.S. dioceses studying for priesthood at St. Mary’s then. It had a capacity for more than twice that number, a reality that created an atmosphere of competition among national seminaries (as opposed to local seminaries like St. John’s in Boston). Though St. Mary’s has undergone a complete revision of its direction since then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was known as a birthplace of theological dissent among priests.

The atmosphere reflected that. Seminarians never wore any form of clerical attire, and would have been laughed out the door if they did. The beautiful main chapel was used for Mass only once per week — on Wednesday nights where a weekly seminary-wide liturgy took place, often hosting clown masses, experimental music (“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas was once the Communion hymn).

There were many liturgical abuses, and any refutation earned the commenter a notation of “theologically rigid” in his file. Other weekday masses were held in small groups in faculty quarters. On Sundays, seminarians were on their own, encouraged to attend Mass at one of several Baltimore parishes. Some rarely ever attended Mass at all.

In 1979, a rift of sorts formed between the seminary rector and those planning for a U.S. visit by Pope John Paul II at the end of the first year of his pontificate. In October, 1979, Pope John Paul II spent six eventful days in the United States, visiting Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Iowa, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

One of the highlights of the visit was Pope John Paul’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on October 2, 1979. He stressed the theme of human rights and the dignity of the person, deploring violations of religious freedoms. However, most of the 67 addresses given by the pope during his visit were directed to Catholics and stressed their responsibilities as believing members of the Church.

The messages were conservative in tone and contained unqualified condemnations of abortion, artificial birth control, homosexual practice, and premarital and extramarital sex. The pope reminded priests of the permanency of their ordination vows and also ruled out the possibility of ordination for women, bringing protests from a number of Catholic feminists.

Little of Pope John Paul’s vision for the Church in the modern world was received with any enthusiasm by the administration and faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. It was in the weeks before this momentous visit that all hell broke loose at St. Mary’s. The seminary rector, now deceased, was a priest of my diocese and a member of the Order of St. Sulpice — aka The Sulpicians — which ran the nation’s oldest seminary since its founding some 200 years earlier.

Just weeks before Pope John Paul’s planned visit, it was somehow learned that all seminarians from several major seminaries in the region were invited by the Holy Father to take part in a Mass for seminarians on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Upwards of a thousand seminarians were to have special seating with an expected crowd of 100,000.

Seminarians at St. Mary’s, however, were never told of the invitation, nor were we told that the Seminary Rector had declined it on our behalf for reasons that he refused to divulge. The resultant furor was shocking; not only for the majority liberal seminarians, but for the administration and faculty who just assumed that we would disdain the theology and vision of Pope John Paul II just as much as they did. A line had been crossed that threatened to sever our identity as future priests.

A letter of protest was quickly drafted and signed by more than half of the 160 seminarians representing some forty dioceses across the land. I was one of the signatories of that letter, a fact that the Rector took very personally because we represented the same diocese. As a result, I was labeled a disobedient rebel.

A seminary-wide meeting was held, and the Rector doubled down on his rejection of the papal invitation. He warned that anyone who attempted to attend the Pope’s Mass one hour away in Washington would not receive permission to do so, and would receive failing grades for any course work assigned for that day. He also said that several crucial exams would be held that day and failing grades would be reported back to the diocese of each seminarian along with a report of disobedience to his legitimate authority.

Needless to say, we went anyway. No one has a vocation to the seminary.

The Priest Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The graphic above is not a real book, so please don’t try to order it on Amazon. It was created by the TSW publisher in response to a post of mine that stirred an uproar when first posted in November, 2013. It was “Stay of Execution: Catholic Conscience and the Death Penalty.”

That post publicly refuted another priest who published a letter in Our Sunday Visitor calling for expanded use of the death penalty in the United States. As a prisoner-priest, I wrote in favor of mercy. But it was I, and not he, who kicked the hornet’s nest.

Back to the seminary: One factor that struck me at St. Mary’s in the 1970s was the unwillingness of some bishops to become involved in — or even aware of — the training of their future priests. Formal complaints from seminarians about the blatant disregard for Pope John Paul II by seminary administration were ignored by most of the bishops who received them.

Some of the more traditional seminarians survived only because they were academically brilliant. They became the priests who kicked the hornets’ nest merely for refusing to either bend in their fidelity or be driven out as candidates for priesthood.

In the years since my ordination, I have heard many stories from priests whose priestly spirits were wounded in a kind of spiritual abuse that characterized their seminary years. Perhaps some will comment here.

But the last word on this goes to Father James Altman, whose recorded homily has mesmerized those Catholics who still value religious freedom, the hardest won of our freedoms, and the most fragile under any hint of a totalitarian regime. Father Altman has kicked the hornet’s nest, too, in a prophetic and much-needed plea to our bishops who have allowed Caesar to rule in the place of Christ. Here is Father James Altman whose brilliant and moving homily has moved many Catholics with the authority of truth. Don’t miss this “Memo to the Bishops of the World.”

“The faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the Supreme Law of the Church and look after their souls.”

— Father James Altman

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The Chinese Communist Party and the True Origin of Covid-19

Conspiracy theories abound about the new coronavirus and Covid-19 pandemic. Evidence now points to an origin other than what the Chinese Communist Party has claimed.

March 5, 2023 — Note from Father Gordon MacRae:

Early in 2020, I wrote the post below about the burgeoning pandemic of Covid 19. My post rejected the Chinese Communist Government’s explanation of its origin. The CCG claimed, and still claims, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated by natural means through an animal sold at the Wuhan, China open market. I laid out a case for why this is likely not so, and why it is much more likely that the virus escaped from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research and other experimentation was being conducted since 2013. This week, a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress concluded, along with the Department of Energy and the FBI, that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a Wuhan laboratory.

If the Chinese Communist Government had been transparent from the beginning, the world may have had a better response to this pandemic. But please remember: China is by force the People’s Republic, but Covid is by no means the people’s pandemic. The good people of China had nothing to do with this.

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My niece, Emily is a Registered Nurse in the specialized Covid-19 treatment unit of a large inner city hospital near Boston. Working many 16-hour days, she and many of the other RNs from that unit were told weeks ago that they cannot go home. Between grueling double shifts they have been staying at a local hotel because of their daily exposure.

Emily has two small children at home where her husband, a native of Hong Kong, is now caring for them while working from home. Recently, Emily took a quick break for a ten-minute virtual Face-Time visit with her family. A still from the visit was sent to my GTL tablet. Emily is masked, covered in her protective gear, and looking tired but resolute. Emily is a warrior on the front lines of battle. I am most proud of her and all medical staff working tirelessly to help contain a pandemic.

I am among those who bristle when some refer to the virus that causes Covid-19 as “the China virus.” I knew that some lurking in the darker corners of America would thus see a new enemy in the many Asian Americans who contribute to the welfare of this nation. Pointing fingers of blame at them is an ignorant and inhumane response to a pandemic that needs unity much more than it needs a fraudulent place to level blame.

There is no evidence to support some of the wilder theories that the virus behind Covid-19 was created and unleashed to destroy the economies of America and other democracies. That is nonsense. There is no economy more imperiled by this global pandemic than that of the People’s Republic of China.

But even among some of the wilder conspiracy theories there has emerged some grains of truth. The official story told by the Chinese Communist government has been that the virus originated entirely by accident at a wildlife market in Wuhan, central China and it likely began with a bat that was either sold at the market or infected another mammal sold at the market. I recently wrote of the plausibility of this in “Holy Week, Coronavirus, Loneliness, Politics, Yikes!”

That official account now seems only partially true. In a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley — a science writer from the United Kingdom where he is also a member of the House of Lords — wrote an intriguing and eye-opening account in “The Bats Behind the Pandemic” (WSJ, April 11-12, 2020). Here is his stunning revelation:

“RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species, Rhinolophus affinis, or rather a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China [over 1,000 miles from Wuhan]. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January [2020], the sample … contains the virus that causes Covid-19.”

As Lord Ridley points out, bats are sold in markets and provided to restaurants across China. The horseshoe bat, however, is a small species that is not typically consumed by humans nor is it sold in Wuhan’s now infamous wildlife market or “wet market.”

It is thus a “horrible coincidence” that China’s Institute of Virology, where the virus that causes Covid-19 has been studied since 2013, just happens to be in Wuhan, the origin of the current pandemic that the Chinese government is blaming on a marketplace. The Washington Post has reported that U.S. officials are now investigating whether the Wuhan lab is the actual source for the global pandemic.

A Global Pandemic from a Communist State

Such an investigation is very difficult to conduct without the cooperation of the Chinese Communist government which, like all such regimes, seeks to preserve itself more than its people. In China, the government filters all information through the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Early in the viral spread, the government expelled foreign journalists from The Wall Street Journal  and The Washington Post, first from Wuhan and then from the nation.

In 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to visit and assess the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The result was a pair of cables sent to Washington warning of inadequate safety measures and “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians” at the lab. The diplomats called for additional funding for the lab from the Chinese government to address these safety concerns. The funding recommendation was ignored. The Chinese government continues to cite the wildlife market as the accidental origin of the virus.

In December, 2019, a team of Wuhan CDC researchers were the subjects of a documentary film about their collection of virus samples from bats in caves across China. The researchers expressed concern about the risk of infection from the samples they obtained. The government then silenced under threat of arrest several local journalists and scientists who began to voice concerns over the emergence of the new virus.

In January, 2020, well after the virus was discovered and began its viral spread, the government allowed an immense banquet with 40,000 families in attendance to take place in Wuhan. At 11 million inhabitants, Wuhan is larger than any U.S. city. Its airport and train depots transport thousands of people per day to points all around the globe.

Of interest, Chinese researchers reported as recently as January 24 that the outbreak had no connection with the Wuhan market. The bat species now known to cause Covid-19 is not found anywhere near Wuhan. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton reported that Yuan Zhiming, a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, denied any connection with the lab and accused the Senator of “deliberately trying to mislead the people.” Yuan Zhiming also serves as Secretary for the lab’s Communist Party Committee.

It is also a “horrible coincidence” — horrible for the people of China, at least — that this global pandemic originated and was spread just in time to terminate the growing pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong that were beginning to spill over into mainland China. I am not suggesting that this coincidence is evidence of intent, for all that I have written here is merely circumstantial evidence. But there are rumblings now in Hong Kong to resume the pro-democracy movement. Never has there been a more important time to lend Western voices in support of them.

There is growing evidence that the whole truth has not been told. China has misled the world about this pandemic in other ways by continuing to falsify vital information. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that China has severely underreported the number of deaths related to the virus and its incidence of transmission.

There is evidence that the total number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number reported throughout the rest of the world. This deceit, according to Wall Street Journal  columnist Walter Russell Mead, “allowed a local outbreak to turn into a global disaster on a massive scale.”

The People’s Republic but NOT the People’s Pandemic

None of this, however, is the fault of the Chinese people. There is a vast difference between the Communist Chinese government (CCG) which is imposed on the people, and the people themselves. They are subjects of the People’s Republic of China but this is clearly not the people’s pandemic. Assessing a pandemic requires accurate knowledge of its origin, timeline, and rate of contagion but in a communist regime, truth is filtered through an agenda more interested in preserving the regime than its subjects.

Since childhood, I have had a fascination with and high regard for China and its people. The first urban community among the Chinese people dates back to the Xia Dynasty in pre-history. When Yu, the last of the ancient Chinese kings died, the people acclaimed his eldest son to take his place.

This was the first example of hereditary “dynastic” leadership. The Xia Dynasty survived for fourteen generations beginning two centuries before Melchizedek blessed Abraham in the 21st Century B.C. (For some historical context, see “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek”).

The stories of Chinese history that I treasured the most in my youth, however, were those told by Marco Polo thirty-four centuries later. Marco Polo’s father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, left Venice in 1260 on a commercial venture to Constantinople (now Istanbul). They were forced by an outbreak of war behind them to continue moving east along the Volga River into present day Russia where they were trapped for three years. Then they joined a diplomatic mission to China to the Court of Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan, grandson of the great Mongol warrior-king, Genghis Khan, received them warmly. The Khan (which means “ruler”) had embraced Buddhism and made it the Chinese state religion. But his reign also tolerated other religions. The Khan was fascinated with Christianity. He asked the Polo brothers to return home and persuade the pope to send scholars to China so he may learn more.

In 1269 A.D., nine years after their departure from Venice, the elder Polo brothers returned to present the Khan’s request to Pope Gregory X. The pope agreed to fund another journey to China to include two missionaries and Niccolo’s son, Marco Polo. Five years later, in 1275, the group reached the court of Kublai Khan where they spent the next 17 years.

The Khan took a great liking to Marco Polo whose stories of his adventures in China would later fascinate the Western World and open the Asian continent for trade with the West. During his time with Kublai Khan, the emperor sent Marco on several diplomatic missions to represent him in Sichuan province in the south of China and Yunnan province in the southwest.

Marco asked several times for the Khan to grant him leave to return to Venice, but the Khan would not agree. Finally, he asked Marco to escort a Chinese princess to Persia (now Iran) to marry its Mongol ruler and then return to Europe. Marco Polo arrived home in 1295, twenty years after leaving. Five centuries after Kublai Khan and Marco Polo brought China to the West, in the 17th Century Ming Dynasty, the Emperor Kangxi invited Jesuit priests to serve as astronomers and allowed them to instruct Catholic converts.

The relationship ended, however, when Pope Alexander VII ruled that the Jesuits must not permit converts to also practice their ancient Chinese ancestral rites. This did not irreparably disrupt Catholicism in China, however. Converts continue to be drawn to it up to the present day, but a threat to religious liberty is China’s other contagion, a story told in my recent post on the “Vatican-China Deal.”

What We Obtain Too Cheap, We May Esteem Too Lightly

Thanks for indulging me in all this history. It is told for a reason, and the reason is to convey that the Chinese people lived for nearly four millennia in a culture rich in honorable customs and openness to the world, including openness to science, faith and technology.

Communism and socialism were once seen as interchangeable terms. There are differences, but their goals remain the same. The socialist doctrine demands state ownership and control of all fundamental means of production and distribution of wealth. Unlike communism, socialism achieves its ends not by violent revolution, but by reconstruction of capitalist political systems through peaceful, democratic, means.

Communism and socialism advocate for the nationalization of natural resources, public utilities, banking and credit, and industry and trade. These are the tenets of the Socialist Party of the U.S., the Labour Party of the U.K., and the labor or social democratic parties of various other democracies.

What they advocate is a slippery slope. Americans and the Western World would do well to remember that the rise of socialism is not historically conducive to the preservation of individual rights and freedoms, including and especially religious freedoms. Like the Chinese Communist Party, in a socialist system the state is always in danger of becoming its own religion.

In China, it was not until the rise of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong in 1949 that communism became the official state religion of what from then on became the People’s Republic of China. Like all oppressive communist regimes, the real battle is over the minds and souls of the people. The Party views all competing loyalties — especially religious ones — with contempt.

But there is one result of the global pandemic unleashed in China that might today bring another snicker of contempt to the faces of the ruling regime. At Holy Week and Easter, 2020, State governments across America — the Cradle of Liberty and self-proclaimed bastion of the Freedom of Religion — ordered churches closed while the liquor stores remained open.

America may not be entirely free of government self-interest either. In the place where I live in captivity — though not by choice or by any act that justifies it — the state just happens to own all the liquor stores.

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