Covid Thoughts: Five Years On

Fr. Robert Hugh Benson was a British priest and science fiction novelist who lived at the turn of the 20th century in Britain. In his 1911 novel, The Dawn of All, the protagonist, Msgr. Masterman, wakes up as an amnesiac in 1970s Britain to find that the whole world has become Catholic and takes the claims of the Church for granted. It is a utopia in which only a few remnants of atheism and socialism exist in unenlightened areas of the globe. 

Because he doesn’t remember anything, Msgr. Masterman sees this new world as we do. He is repeatedly told that the whole world truly believes in the Catholic Faith without reservation, but he finds it hard to internalize this reality and not be repeatedly surprised by it. As the narrator explains: 

[S]omewhere in the back of his mind (why he knew not) there lurked a sort of only half-perceived assumption that the Catholic religion was but one aspect of truth—one point of view from which, with sufficient though not absolute truth, facts could be discerned. He could not understand this; yet there it was.

“[I]n the back of his mind…there lurked a…half-perceived assumption”—not that the Catholic Faith wasn’t true but that it wasn’t complete; that the rest of human experience adds something that is missing from the Faith. This is an arresting line from about the time of the last great plague, the Spanish Flu Pandemic. What can it tell us about how we—collectively as a nation and as a Church and each of us as individuals—responded to the Covid pandemic? What half-perceived, subconscious assumptions guided our actions…or our inaction?

In California, Sunday, March 15, 2020, was the last time that a priest could offer a Mass open to the public; and on Thursday, March 19, Governor Newsom issued Executive Order N-33-20, shutting down the entire state except for the critical infrastructure industries. Mass would not be offered publicly again until Monday, June 8. For 12 weeks, there was no Mass. The question that requires looking at a half-perceived assumption is: Why were churches not considered critical infrastructure? Or, why did each one of us not fight back? 

On a corporate level, the answer is pretty obvious. We live in a secular, post-Christian world—at the very least, California is a secular, post-Christian state. Even if religious liberty didn’t come at a cost, even if it didn’t bump up against gay rights or abortion rights, California—as a state—still would not even want to pay lip service to respecting religious liberty. California doesn’t care about religious liberty at all.

What about on an individual level? Why didn’t each of us protest that churches weren’t considered “critical infrastructure”? Perhaps the answer lies in a quote from Judge Frank Easterbrook of the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a case called Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church v. Pritzker:

[I]t is hard to see how food production, care for the elderly, or the distribution of vital goods through warehouses could be halted. Reducing the rate of transmission would not be much use if people starved or could not get medicine. That’s also why soup kitchens and housing for the homeless have been treated as essential. Those activities must be carried on in person, while concerts can be replaced by recorded music, movie-going by streaming video, and large in-person worship services by smaller gatherings, radio and TV worship services, drive-in worship services, and the Internet. Feeding the body requires teams of people to work together in physical spaces, but churches can feed the spirit in other ways.

In a sense, that seems so reasonable. Judge Easterbrook said the quiet part out loud. He recognized the commonsense assumption behind the lockdown of churches and just said it. But it is false. The Catechism, in section 1131, states: “The sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.” In Section 1129, the Catechism further provides that “The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation.” 

And the Vatican, in its 2002 document The Church and Internet, states: “Virtual reality is no substitute for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental reality of the other sacraments, and shared worship in a flesh-and-blood human community. There are no sacraments on the Internet.” 

So, do you believe that the Eucharist is actually the Body and Blood of Christ or not? Do you believe the sacraments are actually necessary for salvation or not? Do you believe the sacraments actually confer grace or not—that they work ex opere operato—just by being performed? If you said yes to any of these questions, how could you stand by when the church doors were locked?

The answer for each of us is unique, but it seems likely that there are two primary reasons. First: the fog of war; none of us really knew what was going on. Second: a good faith trust; we all wanted to trust the bishops. So that brings up the scarier question: Why did the Church not do anything? For how many priests and bishops was the answer “the fog of war”? And for how many was the answer that they don’t actually believe in grace—that they don’t actually believe that the sacraments are “necessary for salvation”?

Since the pandemic, quite a number of priests and bishops have said that they’ll never withhold the sacraments from the faithful again. They recognize that doing so was an absolute error. It’s good that they recognize that, but is it enough? In the past quarter century, we’ve seen financial crimes, sexual crimes—enough scandal to make anybody want to throw up their hands and walk away; and then the pandemic hit.

For the initial lawsuits against California’s church closure orders, the California bishops were not interested in filing lawsuits. Even after Governor Newsom announced his discriminatory reopening plan, they weren’t interested—neither the Roman bishops nor any of the Eastern eparchies. The most impactful case was filed by a bishop—but a Pentecostal one: Bishop Arthur Hodges of South Bay Pentecostal Church.

Many Catholic commentators have noted that a devout Catholic who takes his faith very seriously may have more in common with a devout non-Catholic than with a weak Catholic. Rod Dreher recently put it like this: 

It’s not so much whether the man in the pew next to you believes or not—he may believe very earnestly—but whether he is willing to accept all of the consequences that may come from that, no matter what? What if your faith required you to abandon your career? Lose your house? 

In that sense, Bishop Hodges and those who truly believe that the sacraments are “necessary for salvation” have a lot in common. But no matter how spiritually homeless we may feel in the Catholic Church, there is no alternative. Full stop. 

Bishop Robert Barron likes to note that the Catholic Faith often takes a puzzling “both/and” approach to many of life’s most difficult questions. The Church can proclaim that we must work for salvation “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12) while, at the same time, proclaiming, “Be Not Afraid!” (Isaiah 41:10). One admonition stresses that salvation is never guaranteed—and should never be presumed—while the other admonition stresses the need to trust in God’s mercy and fatherliness.

The same is true for nearly everything the Church teaches. We must follow the middle path. The middle path recognizes that the Church is our mother, the bishops are our shepherds, that we owe them respect and deference, and that it is perfectly possible for the majority of bishops to be heretics—as happened during the Arian crisis of the fourth century when the majority of bishops denied the divinity of Christ. 

Of course, we can and should recognize the flaws in the Church—we can’t whitewash them by saying, “Well, it’s been bad before.” But no matter how bad it gets, we can never stop fighting for our Mother.