By Michael Hurley at Brownstone dot org.

During Lent in 2022, Michael Hurley published a shorter version of the following essay in American Thinker, lamenting the betrayal of the faithful during the Covid pandemic. After four years, the silence of the bishops continues.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent for Catholics around the world. On this day, priests smear ashes on millions of foreheads while uttering some version of the words, "Remember, man, thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return." Perhaps this year the ritual should be reversed, with the faithful lining up to administer ashes to priests and bishops until their white surplices are covered with an unmistakable reminder of their own mortality.

Everywhere today there are hopeful signs that the political revolution traveling under the guise of Covid-19 may be faltering, but the shockwaves it sent through the Church are still reverberating and slowly widening, two years after the fact. The opening salvos of this revolution still echo in these five words:

The bishops closed the churches.

Let that sentence wash over you, slowly, and you may begin to grasp its enduring significance. Never before in human history, through centuries of war and famine and disease, has there been a worldwide closure of the Church that Christ founded to conquer death over—wait for it—the fear of death.

To understand the scope of the damage that has been done to the Church, let's begin with a thought experiment. Assume you are given the power to save the soul of one person from an eternity in Hell, but to do so, you must make martyrs and saints of every man, woman, and child now living on the face of the earth. How would you choose? If you could be assured that every life lost would rise to glory in Heaven, would you calculate the value of saving one person from Hell to exceed the value of all the days and years of life lost to the billions whose earthly lives would be cut short? Would billions and billions of days of life on earth, and all the joy and wonder and happiness they would surely contain, be worth one soul lost to an eternity in Hell?

To some, this will seem a preposterous question, because none of us can fathom eternity and many of us no longer believe in Hell. But the Church does—or at least it did until around March 2020. It was then that the Church made the wrong decision: that prolonging our lives by a few days or years (a goal that lockdowns spectacularly failed to accomplish) was worth the souls that would be lost and the long-term damage to the faith that would result from denying millions of people the sacraments as they watched their shepherds flee in a time of widespread fear.

The idea that the bishops had "no choice" but to close the churches because the government "made them" do so is pretty weak sauce. The Roman Empire banned the practice of Christianity upon pain of death for the first four centuries of the Church's history. All but one of the twelve apostles—the original bishops—were martyred for their stubborn resistance to Jewish and Roman demands that they "close the churches."

Had our bishops decided to bring communion to the chronically ill and frail elderly but invite the overwhelming majority of parishioners for whom Covid posed scant mortal danger to celebrate mass publicly, does anyone seriously believe that the same governments that kept garden centers and liquor stores open and allowed BLM protests would have resisted a united front of bishops with 1.4 billion of the world's Catholics behind them? Instead, frightened bishops in America and Europe offered not a fig leaf of resistance and, in the UK, even quietly urged the government to "compel" them to close their doors.

Christ is "the good shepherd." (John 10:11) Every bishop, standing in persona Christi, carries a shepherd's crozier as a symbol of his duty to his flock. In the Gospel of John, we learn the difference between a good shepherd and a bad one: "He who is a hireling a...