Dear Bishops and Priests: Open the Churches; Give Us the Sacraments; Get Your Sword and Get Into the Battle

A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but this is not that day!
An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day!
This day we fight!
By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!

                       Aragon, at the Black Gate, rousing his men for battle.

In this hour, we hold in highest esteem our health care workers, police, and all on the front line who are charging into the danger zone to save lives. By contrast, where is our Church and our priests? They are self-isolating, as if they were ordinary civilians. Churches are closed; the sacraments are banned; the dying are without the last rites, sinners deprived of absolution, and the dead without a reverent burial. Our faith is considered "non-essential"...something we can do without for a few months during the crisis...something possibly worthwhile but not necessary. "We can do without the sacraments for a while" we hear said cavalierly, very close to presumption.

In this age of McCarrick, is the image of the priest...systemic cover--ups of the abuse of adolescent boys...now to become even worse? How many people in twenty years will recall:  I was in the hospital on life support for two weeks; I never saw a priest! My mother died without the last rites; there was no priest! Then she was buried without family and friends; denied dignity! I was struggling with mortal sin, but without access to confession!

If dollar stores, liquor stores construction sites, corner bodegas and a host of institutions can function in the crisis, do you tell me that Catholic pastors are not to be trusted? Has our confidence in our pastors declined so abysmally that they are best left isolated behind locked doors in their rectories, live-streaming daily liturgies and active on social media?

I cannot accept that there are not ways to worship together and to access the sacraments in ways that are compliant with public health...hand hygiene, social distancing, masks, and so forth. If dollar store managers can do it; certainly our pastors can. I do not know of a more responsible, reliable group in this world. A man does not become pastor in the Catholic Church without years of formal education and decades of experience in the trenches. They are the equivalent of admirals in the navy. It is a sacrilege to imprison them in locked rectories.

Have we lost a vigorous, expectant faith in the healing, sanctifying, transforming powers of our sacraments that they can be dispensed with in difficult times, just when we need them the most?

Imagine if our nurses and doctors were directed by the state to abandon the sick and dying. They would calmly and courageously defy  and proceed to care for them. What about our priests? Where is the zeal for souls, the missionary fervor, the passion for communion in the Holy? Where is the spirit of Pope Francis...the field hospital, the smell of the flock, the push to the peripheries...when we need it?

Our parish is blessed by a marvelous young priest: wholesome, athletic, energetic, highly intelligent, and deeply spiritual. Young and healthy, he told me he would gladly don the correct PPE and go into the hospitals and nursing homes and all the battle zones, exercising his priestly mission, always using correct protective protocols. He was a baseball player; he wants to get his glove and get in the game! He is being restrained by a policy of timidity.

Perhaps the decision to lock down the Church was appropriate for a few weeks at the start of this pandemic, to bend the curve and highlight the gravity. But the time of caution is now past. In an atmosphere of pervasive anxiety panic, we do not need our Church to be timid, defensive, passive, isolated. It is a time for boldness, vigor, magnanimity, resoluteness, confidence. Let our priests, especially the young and the healthy, stand with Aragon at Black Gate:

"There may come a day when the shepherds abandon their flock and shelter in place in their rectories; when churches are locked; when the sacraments are banned; when the sick, the dying and the sinful are without the sacraments! But this is NOT that day!" 

Disclaimer: The above should be taken with some discretion as the author has been diagnosed with multiple psychological morbidities. He shows paranoid tendencies: is convinced that there is a supernatural power, an actual diabolic spirit, that desires to destroy him. He obsesses about what he calls "The Cultural Revolution" which he thinks has destroyed the fabric of the family and society. He has a melodramatic propensity: he imagines everything in terms of an ongoing spiritual combat of good and bad forces. He sees even the most mundane events in a binary lens: obsessing about God and the devil, heaven and hell, good and bad. He is blatantly heteronormative in his fascination with masculinity and femininity. Fortunately, he is not homophobic as he has a preferential affection for homosexuals whom he stereotypes as intelligent, compassionate, witty, sensitive and unusually gifted; but there is a mild machoophobia evident in his disdain for jock culture and toxic masculinity. He does not disguise his superstitiousness: he believes in bi-location, demonic possession, plenary indulgences for what he calls "the souls in purgatory." He has a tempered trust in science but prefers to pray for miraculous healing. He seems to suffer intrusive "victim syndrome" thoughts: he attributes enormous evil consequences...break-up of family, deaths by despair, polarization of society, crisis in masculinity...to contraception. He is known to fly into violent temper tantrums if he hears the conjunction of two words:  "contraception"  and "mandate."  He displays a classic "warrior-hero" complex: note his fascination with Aragon. He seems to want to be a hero. Add to that that he thinks he is supposed to be a "saint" and you have a particularly grave co-morbidity. His guilt complex is evident in his rush to confession on virtually a weekly basis.