When God Deployed a Sinner to Save a Nation: The Biblical Precedent

Would God call a known sinner to save a nation? If so, it would not be for the first time if Religious Freedom is at stake. There is a striking Biblical precedent.

Over fifteen years of writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I have tried to steer clear of politics. It hasn’t been easy because politics by its very nature has tentacles reaching into every aspect of existence in the human community. The word comes from the Latin, politicus which came from Greek, politikos, meaning “citizen of the city.” To be human is to practice politikos.

But as you know from the daily news, practice does not make perfect. I had a little practice of my own in my highly politically sensitive post, “The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade.” For some, just using the current President’s name in a sentence is to lend to him some sort of tacit endorsement or approval.

Listening to the news, some commentators refuse to call him “President” Trump. He is, for them, simply “Trump,” uttered with a hint of audible disdain that would have been widely condemned during previous administrations. At MSNBC, he appears to be the only politician in America.

Recently, I passed by a group of twenty-something young adults in a heated argument about Mr. Trump’s fitness for office. I tried to stay out of it, but as I passed I was asked whether I think he should be elected. I responded politically: “Well,” I said, “that is a matter for all the voters to decide, and not just the pundits from the ruling class.”

Because I qualified my answer, the “Not My President” crowd was horrified. “So, you actually LIKE Trump?!” they shot back incredulously — as though I were wearing a MAGA hat and a red tie of my own. My response was not a matter of like or dislike, but rather one of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news.

There is a vast difference in the politics of today and those of decades past. There are few Americans in America. We are now mostly Republicans and Democrats.

Should Christianity Today Trump the President?

I have long admired the work of Eric Metaxas, author of over thirty books including, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In 2020, I was very pleased to see a provocative op-ed from him in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Christian Case for Trump” (Jan. 8, 2020).

Before the 2020 election, much of the news media had hyped an editorial in the venerable Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, founded by the late Billy Graham. On the heels of the impeachment vote in Congress, the editors of Christianity Today endorsed the removal of President Trump from office citing that his behavior has been “profoundly immoral,” his character “grossly” so, and the “facts” of his guilt “unambiguous.”

I also cringed when I first read the response by Eric Metaxas because I knew that I might feel compelled to write about it. That means wading into a national partisan battle of words and attitudes with little connection to truth. I know some readers cannot see the Metaxas article without a WSJ subscription, so I will summarize its major points.

Mr. Metaxas clarified the politics behind the flap. In the 1990s, the editors of Christianity Today publicly endorsed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton citing that his moral failings made him unfit for office. As you may recall, President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate.

Some of Mr. Trump’s detractors cited the Evangelical magazine’s position in the Clinton case while accusing Evangelicals of hypocrisy if they did not apply the same standards to Mr. Trump. As with President Clinton, Mr. Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate. But Mr. Metaxas asks whether the comparison makes sense. “Aren’t the political realities different two decades later?” I will get back to that, but the heart of the point made by Metaxas is theological, and it is a point with which I strongly agree:

“But these subjective pronouncements promote a perversion of Christian doctrine, [a doctrine] which holds that all are depraved and equally in need of God’s grace. For Christianity Today to advance this misunderstanding is shocking. It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.”

Christianity Today got this embarrassingly wrong. The political reality of the last two decades has seen orchestrated efforts to park Christianity outside the public square. Jesus may be seen as irrelevant by the growing secularism in America, but this must not be so for people of faith. Metaxas described the magazine’s editorial as evidence not of its noble truths, or its roots in the Biblical witness of Reverend Billy Graham, but rather of its “Slough of Despond populated by liberal elites.”

In light of a prior post at this blog — “March for Life: A New Great Awakening” — I am conscious that this self-righteous culture may be seeing a moral splinter in this President’s eye while ignoring the immensity of the moral lumber in its own. I was encouraged and affirmed in the above post by this brilliant but deeply unsettling presentation by Eric Metaxas of the truth about our moral compromises:

“In the 1990s, some Democrats were antiabortion. Neither party could exclusively claim the high ground on this deepest of moral issues. Mr. Clinton spoke of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” No longer. Democrats endorse abortion with near unanimity often beyond viability and until birth. If slavery was rightly considered… both a moral and political issue, how can this macabre practice be anything else? How can Christians pretend this isn’t the principal moral issue of our time as slavery was in 1860? Can’t these issues of historic significance outweigh whatever the President’s moral failings might be?”

Prolife Catholics and Evangelicals were also affirmed when President Trump became the first sitting U.S. President to appear in person and address the March for Life. Evangelical Americans formed a wide cross section of President Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 presidential election, though it is widely believed that at least some of their enthusiasm was not so much for Trump as it was against the alternative. That is the same case in play in 2024. Pope Francis, who never injects himself into U.S. politics, has urged American Catholics to vote for the candidate and party that inflicts the least moral harm. He clarified, without names, that one candidate rejects migrants while the other “kills children.”

The choice of president in 2016 also presented one, and perhaps two, opportunities to nominate lifetime appointments to fill likely vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. As you know, it turned out to be three vacancies which led directly to overturning Roe v. Wade and therefore returning the judgment to voters in each state. For many who found themselves weighing the lesser of evils in 2016, consideration of who sits on the Supreme Court for life actually (and morally) outweighed who occupied the White House for the next four years.

Two Decades of Christianity’s Cultural Decline

As I have written elsewhere, the first Great Awakening in America was a religious revival in the Colonies by Presbyterian preachers who inspired a sense of national identity that led to the Revolutionary War of 1776. In the United States today, self-described Wiccans outnumber Presbyterians.

This is not the same country that it was just a decade ago. Topics like religion and Religious Liberty have been under increasing assault. We have every reason to believe the trend toward secularism will continue. The need to protect Religious Liberty has never been more urgent. In 2010, seventy-six percent of Americans identified as Christians. By 2020 that figure had diminished to sixty-five percent.

In 2010, fifty-one percent of Americans identified as Protestant. By 2020, the figure had dropped to forty-three percent. The missing eight percent did not convert to some other religion. They abandoned religion to join the “Nones,” people who profess no faith in anything but secularism. In 2010, seventeen percent of Americans did not identify with any organized religion. In 2020, that figure now exceeds twenty-six percent.

The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination and a conservative political force, lost 1.5 million members over the last decade. The second and third largest Protestant denominations, Episcopalians and Methodists, had major schisms, dividing over LGBTQ issues along political fault lines.

Among American millennials — identified as those born between 1981 and 1996 — forty percent claim no religious affiliation at all beyond their embrace of secularism. For this age group, this represents an increase of thirteen percentage points in just the last decade.

In the same decade — despite media hype of sex scandals, financial scandals, and battles between Traditionalists and progressives — those calling themselves Catholic declined by only three percent. Lest Catholics take too much pride in that, a WSJ/NBC news poll in 2000 revealed that Americans, including Catholics, who attend religious services at least once per week stood at forty-one percent. By 2020, the figure had declined to twenty-nine percent.

All of these statistics create a snapshot of religion in America before Covid. During the Covid crisis under the Biden Administration, government mandates at the state and federal levels across the land shuttered churches as “nonessential” gathering places. Liquor stores and casinos remained open while most Christians were barred from congregrating in any way but remotely. I wrote of the catastrophic effect this has had on the Catholic Church in American when too many of our bishops placidly went along with these government restrictions. That post was “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” Christianity in America has not recovered from Covid.

The decline has merely continued and we have no reason to believe it will stop. If the next president is not someone who is sensitive and supportive of Religious Freedom, regardless of whether he or she practices any religion of their own, then religion in America is doomed.

My Country ’Twas of Thee

History sometimes repeats itself. In “President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform,” I wrote of another possible basis for seeing a flawed character in a more Biblical light.

In 722 B.C., Israel fell to the Assyrians and was sent into exile. In 605 B.C., the Kingdom of Israel divided between north and south. The southern Kingdom of Judah fell into Babylonian captivity. In 587 B.C., Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. This was the time of the apocalyptic Prophets — Daniel, Ezekiel and Baruch. A century earlier, Isaiah actually prophesied the name of the man who would one day restore Israel to its rightful path and preserve its heritage:

“Thus says the Lord to his anointed: To Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”

— Isaiah 45:1

Between 559 and 530 B.C., a man named Cyrus the Great united the Medes and Persians [in present day Iran] to form the great Persian Empire. Fifty years after Israel was invaded, cast into exile, and suffered the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, Cyrus and his armies conquered Babylon.

However no one but Isaiah could have predicted that, for the Jews in exile, Cyrus would turn out to be more of a liberator than a conqueror. He practiced no religious faith that the Jews could recognize. He lived a lifestyle with values deplorable to them. But this disruptor of no faith at all turned out to develop deep respect for theirs.

Cyrus restored the Kingdom of Israel, ordered his armies to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, declared an end to slavery and oppression, and established a charter to protect Religious Liberty. The Book of the Prophet Ezra contains the entire Decree of Cyrus guaranteeing Religious Liberty for the Jews and protecting it throughout the Persian Empire. But Cyrus himself never changed.

The Prophet Isaiah certainly never envisioned anyone like Donald Trump leading an America in rapid religious decline. He is notorious for living in a manner understandably anathema to Evangelical Christians, and yet he has also come to be seen as a Cyrus-like defender of Religious Liberty. No president in modern times has done more to protect and defend Religious Freedom.

So let me repeat myself, please. If the “Not My President” crowd is horrified as though I wrote this post wearing a MAGA hat and a “Not My Impeachment” T-shirt, this is not a matter of like or dislike. It is a matter of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news, and I am not willing to hand my Truth over to them.

A little perspective is always a good thing. This candidate’s moral past, his former overused Twitter account, and his novel approach to both foreign policy and the swamp of contemporary politics pale next to the moral decline of a nation that has terminated the lives of sixty-two million future citizens.
Some were appalled, but not nearly appalled enough, when 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, a member of the current White House Cabinet, distorted our Sacred Scripture to defend the mass extermination of human life:

“There’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath… the kind of cosmic question of where life begins. It ought to be up to the woman making the decision.”

We were not nearly appalled enough when former candidate Beto O’Rourke called for an end to Religious Rights and Freedom for any institution that fails to fall in line with same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ political narratives. We were not nearly appalled enough when the remaining Democratic candidates offered no rebuttal, not even an audible gasp.

But to quote Eric Metaxas one more time, “It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.” That may include faith in the notion that God can choose a sinner like King Cyrus as an instrument of good in the bigger picture of human history, and maybe even one like Donald Trump.

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Editor’s Note: Father MacRae emphasizes that this post is not an endorsement of a political candidate. It is an endorsement of a solid Catholic tradition that redemption is open to all who seek it.

Please share this post and ponder these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls

Donald Trump Has a Prayer by Father Raymond de Souza

Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age

One Nation Under God: The Future of the U.S. Supreme Court

Neither Donald Trump nor I Should Wear That Scarlet Letter!

President Trump and Melania Trump pray at the Shrine of Saint John Paul II in Washington, DC

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

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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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading with open hearts and minds. Please Subscribe to Beyond These Stone Walls and Follow us on Facebook.

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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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also wish to read and share these memorable related posts:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List

Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester

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