My principal, practical hope from the present viral medical crisis — a light affliction as these things go, but heavy enough to get everyone’s attention — is that it will help people think. For everywhere I turn, I see plain lessons, especially for Christians, including lapsed ones. It is as if the Creator were reminding us how to tell what is important from what is not. It is interesting to me how the infection has suddenly shut down almost everything in the latter category, and made the world quiet for a moment.
But paradoxically, He has also let His Church be publicly closed, as a much-deserved scourge, cutting her off from all routine sources of income. Yet she is living within. At the place I attend, for instance, the Fathers are singing eleven Masses each day, to empty, often locked chapels. These are sung on behalf of the people, while they are “away.”
Am I saying there could be something godly in this; in this systematic confutation of all received “ideological” views? Gentle reader will guess that I am saying, Yes.