We Must Reopen Churches

 From last May, when the first round of lock downs began to ease. 

As the lockdown wears on and we go from being swept up in the novelty of it all where we find ourselves taking selfies with our stockpile of toilet paper to facing the reality of it and asking questions like, “how we’re going to pay our rent?” I can understand if you’re starting to struggle with the justifications for shutting the world down over the pandemic and wondering if that’s a fair trade-off.

As a Catholic, this question was renewed for me recently when I started to read reports of churches and dioceses re-opening but under such heavy restrictions that they might as well not. And in thinking about it I felt like I had a bit of a breakthrough that might help you sort out what you think of all of this. I’m reminded of a passage from GK Chesterton’s Heretics which I had alluded to in another video recently but can’t remember which one.

He said something like, man fell twice. First in the Garden where he gained the knowledge of good and evil. And then at another point in which he lost the knowledge of good and can now only speak of the evil that he enthusiastically denounces. I’ve noticed that our response to this pandemic has revealed how right Chesterton is. Our solution or solutions to the pandemic have been exclusively focused on simply avoiding evil and giving into fear of the consequence of that evil: namely the potential for many people to dieAnd there’s nothing wrong with appreciating that possibility. But there’s a trade-off taking place and we are blind to it because of our inability to describe what our chief goods are. Any philosophy or any articulation of what humanity should be doing must start by asking questions like, what is a human being, what is our purpose, and what is our highest good?

All the great thinkers up until the modern age started there and while many would get it wrong, that never discouraged them from assuming that these are the most important questions and every attempt to live our lives well is a reply to those questions. But the modern world has discarded any attempt to explicitly answer those questions of an ethical nature as mere opinion rather than ornaments of knowledge among all the other things we know. So while we seem to be utterly incapable of articulating what it is that we are to do and to seek in life, we haven’t lost our ability to anticipate negative things and evil outcomes and it is that awareness that has monopolized our response to the pandemic. Any affirmation of what we should do to achieve some good, if it competes with the risks that we’ve identified, then it’s met with sloganeering like, “you’d rather old people die than wear a face mask is that it?” And now that politicians and leaders are trying to find ways for us to return to work and frankly, live our lives, is getting a lot of push back from those who can’t see anything other than possible bad things that could happen.

But that’s the trade-off. Morality is a two-sided equation. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the first precept of natural law is, “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided." It involves both, but we are paralyzed and prevented from doing any good in our daily lives right now. Goods like working, getting an education, worshipping together, visiting those who are lonely and in need. And in fact, we’re so terrified of certain kinds of obvious evils, like the risk of infection and death, that we can’t see a couple steps beyond that to other kinds of risks like the fact that suicides have dramatically gone up in certain places.

And that can only be a consequence of the fact that we’ve stripped people of the only good things they had in order to preserve their lives. Except, that obviously doesn’t work.

We can’t avoid what is good to prevent evil. If that’s the trade-off, and I’m afraid that in many respects, that’s what we’ve exchanged, then it isn’t a surplus good. Our lives are meant to be lived in the pursuit of good ends through our actions which should all accumulate to some ultimate good.

As a Catholic, I recognize that highest good as knowing and loving God and the acts that performs this love is in worship and participating in the sacraments and loving my neighbor as myself and at the moment one of those things is impossible while the other is severely restricted. We are forfeiting our highest good so as to avoid evil and while I thought about that, an analogy came to mind. What if I told you that the next time you received the sacrament of Holy Communion, you would die? Would you abstain from it for the rest of your life in order to preserve your vital signs or would you gladly accept the loss of your temporal life in the hopes of gaining eternal life according to the promises of Christ? Read the rest of the transcript at: brianholdsworth.ca