PUTTING OUR LORD IN LOCKDOWN, CHURCH AND ECONOMY IN ECLIPSE

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"We don't close down churches. The Coronavirus cannot survive in the Eucharistic Body of Christ; it will soon be burnt away."

Dear Bishops of New Zealand, do you see? It doesn't have to be this way. There's no need to put Our Eucharistic Lord in lockdown. 

John Magufuli is president of Tanzania, a country of 57 million people, and a Catholic. On Laetare Sunday (ironically for New Zealanders denied Holy Mass, the Sunday to "Rejoice!") he spoke at St Paul's Cathedral in the nation's capital. 

“I insist upon you my fellow Christians and even (Muslims), do not be afraid, do not stop gathering to glorify God and praise Him,” said Magufuli. “That is why as a government we didn’t close down churches or mosques. 

“Instead, they should be always open for the people to seek refuge to God,” Magufuli insisted. “Churches are places where people could seek the true healing, because there the True God resides. Do not...be afraid of praising and seeking God’s face in the Church.

“That is exactly why I did not panic while taking the Holy Communion, because I knew, with Jesus in the Eucharist I am safe,” said President Magufuli. “This is the time of building our faith in God.”

In a previous display of his Catholic faith, in 2018 Magufuli encouraged Tanzanians to disregard the pressure coming from pro-contraception foreigners and continue reproducing. He promised that the government would improve healthcare, specifically maternal health with the building of 67 new hospitals. 

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/catholic-african-president-on-coronavirus-we-didnt-close-down

Bishop Serverus Jjumba of Masaka, Uganda, has told his people that God sent the coronavirus to show He is still in command.

"God is angry with mankind because people no longer respet Him, and they behave in (an) unbecoming manner," he said. He asked the Catholic community to pray to God through the 22 Ugandan martyrs so that Covid-19 is ended throughout the world. 

https://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2020/churches-begin-canceling-masses-in-effort-to-stem-covid-19-pandemic.cfm

Magufili and Jjumba are contributing to the fulfilment of a prediction of Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, in his must-read Christus Vincit, that Africa will show the post-Christian Western world the way back to Christ:

"I think that the Catholic bishops of Africa can give to the world, especially in the West, this fresh air of a pure childlike faith and a deep reverence for the sacred. Yes, a deep reverence for the laws of God. ... The African people still have a repentant and contrite soul. 

"Euthanasia is unthinkable for an African ...even to put one's parents in a nursing home is unthinkable for the Africans. 

"These values of the fresh, pure faith of a child, the attitude of repentance of a sinner, the deep sense of family, and respect and love for the parents, will enrich Western people and the Church in Western countries.

"For (Africans), even for non-Christians, contraception is unthinkable. They have the natural instinct that contraception is against nature. It is an issue of natural law.

"Western society is once again becoming barbaric, with barbarian cruelties. The number of abortions perpetrated in the Western world is barbaric and is worse than the cruelest pagan practices in Africa. ... People are killing their own babies on a mass scale and justifying this with laws." 

You may think this is all a digression. It's not. 

Only two days after Ardern et al passed a world-beater in horrific abortion law, the Catholic bishops of our country cancelled all public Masses, making it impossible for their people to attend and assist at Mass in our churches. 

(Even St Anthony's SSPX Whanganui is forced to comply - but you can 'assist' at their Masses every day, virtually, as I did this arvo. Tomorrow I will use headphones: all I could hear was the server's cough, so I missed Fr Francois Laisney's ten-minute sermon - yes, even on a weekday Low Mas. I'll return to it tomorrow with the headgear.)

Behold now, the wrath of God. We do not deserve the august Sacrifice of the Mass, so it's been confiscated. Pope Paul VI stated in his Encyclical Mysterium Fidei of 1965, "In the Mass the Church ... applies the unique and infinite redemptive power of the sacrifice of the Cross to the salvation of the whole world. 

Behold, the wrath of God also in imposing His own Lenten retreat on the world. Cafes and bars and nightclubs and restaurants are shut down: no more lattes or sauvignon blanc poured. Airplanes are grounded: no more "Today it's Tuesday, so this must be Belgium". Cruise ships are docked, unhappy passengers condemned to their cabins. Business is unbusied, employees unemployed. 

And to what end?  

According to Terence Corcoran, writing in the Financial Post:

The global economic experiment in pandemic control continues to expand, nation by nation, economic sector by economic sector, worker by worker. Governments are getting the headlines: In Japan there is talk of US$260 billion in government action. The U.S. is said to be aiming for US$1 trillion in new spending. Canada announced $82 billion in direct and indirect spending. France $550 billion. Spain $150 billion.

And so it goes around the globe, and where it will end, nobody knows. 

At Catholic Culture, Jeff Mirus has dared to ask a few questions about the level of panic we are witnessing and the degree of overweening government interventions.

Economies are being destroyed around the world, including in the United States. This is happening not because of the devastation of the Coronavirus but because of the governmental fear that the virus might be devastating if extreme anti-plague measures are not adopted. As the prevention measures become more and more stringent, most of the public assumes they are more and more necessary—that COVID-19 must really be a very serious threat. After all, even if it isn’t so bad right now, it might mutate into something worse.

Almost anyone who looks at the hard data realizes, to put it in terms used this week by two very intelligent, well-informed, and seriously Catholic personal friends, that “the body count just doesn’t add up.” A relatively small number (as epidemics go) have caught the virus, and an extraordinarily small number of people have had severe symptoms from the virus. Moreover, even those very few who have died of it have almost universally been not only elderly but already seriously weakened by some other condition.

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/todays-heresy-questioning-response-to-coronavirus/

The American political science scholar Angelo Codevilla is also asking some questions:

Our 21st-century “developed” world, which so touts its own rationality, is now engaged in the historically unprecedented attempt to shut down most social and economic intercourse for the sake of mitigating the effects of a virus the lethality of which is far more like recent strands of the flu than that of the plague. 

While everyone is in a panic about the coronavirus (officially renamed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization), there's an even deadlier virus many people are forgetting about: the flu.

Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 people have died from influenza between Oct. 1, 2019 through Feb. 1, 2020, and the number of deaths may be as high as 30,000. 

The CDC also estimates that up to 31 million Americans have caught the flu this season, with 210,000 to 370,000 flu sufferers hospitalized because of the virus. 

Let this sink in. 31 million Americans have had the flu.  Thousands have died.  This season.  In a well vaccinated environment, relative to coronavirus.  And in a not especially bad American flu season.

And so huge numbers of people around the world are faced with economic ruin.

The American conservative pundit and Editor of The New Criterion Roger Kimball believes that all the government induced panic is both exaggerated and irresponsible:

I believe that panic-stricken scenarios are not only wildly exaggerated but also irresponsible. Many commentators, including me, have noted that the common flu is 1) more contagious, 2) infects millions every years, and 3) kills many more people, especially young and otherwise healthy people than this latest Chinese import.

In Australia and in other Western countries (like New Zealand), governments have set in train embedded panic and have instituted measure way out of proportion to the real nature of the threat.  Many people are simply scared witless, even though their chances of getting ill are, objectively, miniscule."

https://thefreedomsproject.com/item/499-the-establishment-s-crisis

What New Zealand should fear far more than the latest bug is the prospect of Big Sister Jacinda Ardern, having charmed and nannied the nation through her four weeks of incarceration, being re-elected in September and smilingly prime ministering mass killing of babies (and old people, if euthanasia gets enough ticks), ably assisted I'm sorry to say, by our leftish Church hierarchy and the media, who love nothing more than a Crisis and who will keep it going at all costs, the greatest cost being the nation's loss of life, not through the panicemic of coronavirus but through being manoeuvred into greater control by the State. 

But even more than all of this, New Zealand Catholics should fear not loss of their life, or loss of life in their family, but the loss of their eternal life. 

It's glaringly obvious, even without the shining comparison of Catholic orthodoxy afforded by the Prime Minister of Tanzania and the Ugandan bishop, that the Church in New Zealand is terribly wanting in faith. 

Bishop Schneider presents us with a principle: “God is more important, and eternity is more important, than the creature and the temporal realities, just as the soul is in itself more important than the body, for the soul is immortal.” 

It's a principle which seems lost to our bishops. There were so many options available to them, but they jumped the gun even on this sick government in their haste to cancel the Mass and lock up, but not down, our Eucharistic Lord.

"Out of this principle flows the conviction that the Church should always have the supernatural at the center of her activities. 

"Yet Bishop Schneider sees that Modernism – which is a “denial or the weakening of the supernatural” and the inordinate stressing of history and reason – has entered the life of the Catholic Church: 

“Since the Second Vatican Council,” he states, “the Church in her life has yielded in large measure to the influence of secularism and naturalism.” In this sense, he adds, there has currently taken place “an eclipse” of the “primacy of God, of eternity, of the primacy of grace, of prayer, of sacredness, and of adoration.” 

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/bishop-schneiders-handbook-for-correcting-errors-in-life-of-church-today

"It is quite disquieting," writes Bishop Schneider in Christus Vincit, to read the statement of the Masonic Grand Lodge of Spain on December 27, 2018: "that all Freemasons of the world join with the petition of the pope for fraternity among diverse religions."

The Freemason architects of Vat II's Novus Ordo, chief among them Mons Annibale Bugnini, have succeeded probably beyond their wildest dreams: in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Slovakia, Malta, Austria, Ireland, parts of the US, Quebec, Peru, Philippines, parts of Vietnam and in Ghana, the lay faithful are now unable to attend Holy Mass. 

The Church is indeed in eclipse, just as Our Lady predicted at La Salette, France. 

"Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist ...

"The Church will be in eclipse, the world will be in dismay. ... At first, we will not know which is the true pope. Then secondly, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass will cease to be offered in churches and houses; it will be such that, for a time, there will not be public services any more. But I see that the Holy Sacrifice has not really ceased: it will be offered in barns, in alcoves, in caves, and underground." 

Praying the Rosary daily and finishing with the Prayer to St Michael, we could reflect in these days of  enforced Retreat on passages from that prayer of Pope Leo XIII which have been lost over the years:

"These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions. 

"In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered. 

O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we implore thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel St Michael, thou wouldst help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits who wander about the world for the ruin of souls. 

Amen."