Guttered?

John 15:18-19

If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

The world hates Christians; the world hates Catholics most of all. There is little threat to the progressive (socialist? liberal?) agenda from nice Episcopalians/Anglicans or from the congenial United Church of Canada (the NDP at prayer) and its Lutheran bedfellows. Sadly, those groups have drunk the Kool-Aid of religion-lite, the same bitter cocktail being served up in too many Catholic parishes.

gut·ter /ˈɡədər/

verb

past tense: guttered; past participle: guttered

(of a candle or flame) flicker and burn unsteadily. "the candles had almost guttered out"

Dom Cingoranelli at Catholic Stand has written “Nonessential” Churches – What’s Next?, a concise analysis of the status quo and a rejection of complacency that asks readers to exert right effort to confront the current untenable situation, i.e., the prohibition of public worship while other "essential" services continue. Liquor stores, for one.

This nonessential/essential status for churches needs our attention–now. I am no public health expert. Yet, it seems that even the “experts” can’t agree on the nature, severity, avoidance, treatment or probable virus-related outcomes. In fact, some experts and others not part of mainstream media believe that the current quarantine of healthy people clearly is wrong.

Cingoranelli continues:

A question that comes up in some Christian conversations now is, “How long do we go on with church gatherings being considered ‘nonessential’ until they’re just considered altogether ‘unnecessary’?” Some politicians and their media supporters have an ax to grind with Christianity in general, and with Catholicism in particular. To borrow a phrase from Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, perhaps some elected officials “can’t handle the Truth.” Perhaps some of them wish to be set free of the Truth and the light it shines on their actions. We should pray for them. We should pray, as well, for an end to these restrictions on worship.

Dom Cingoranelli: "the current quarantine of healthy people clearly is wrong." Agreed.

Timothy Flanders, quoting Pope Pius XI at 1Peter5, has captured the vacuousness of political projects that pretend to offer a comprehensive satisfaction.

"It may be said in all truth that the Church, like Christ, goes through the centuries doing good to all. There would be today neither Socialism nor Communism if the rulers of the nations had not scorned the teachings and maternal warnings of the Church. On the bases of liberalism and laicism they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbling one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus."

Pius XI wrote these words in 1937, when the secular tenuous international organization, the League of Nations (forerunner to the United Nations), was about to shattered by the onset of the Second World War. The pontiff saw through the lens of history that all the efforts of modernity, no matter how vast and impressive, were nothing without the blessing and authority of His Majesty, Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings. As the same pontiff had said more than a decade prior in the wake of the global bloodshed of World War I:

"[T]hese manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: … as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations."

Will Catholics rise to the challenge to help orient societies to well founded, tried and true Christian principles, principles that have fostered humane societies in the past? Or, have Catholics guttered out? Will Catholics fizzle like other so-called christian groups and dimly burn, allowing proscriptions to become the prescriptions that enable a new order, a new norm preached by the state and parroted by devotees that dictates where, when and how fundamental freedoms such as freedom of religion and freedom of association are observed? How much do we give to Caesar, and how much is Caesar's to give?

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Apparently, the restriction of public worship, which is to say the prohibition of congregations even in huge spaces that can safely host small gatherings where people can be much more than two metres apart, accords with the concept of "reasonable limits prescribed by law" as stated in Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms cited above.