EDMONTON, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) — If there was a shred of hope in our Catholic hierarchy left, a recent homily from the Archbishop of Edmonton annihilated it. Our Canadian Catholic leaders are completely out-of-touch with reality. They don’t know the people they are meant to shepherd. They don’t even seem to attempt to understand the working class. They are elitists, as dogmatic and hypocritical as Pharisees.
The reading for Sunday Mass on January 30 was Luke 4:21-30. Jesus was in the synagogue among his own people. He called out their hard hearts, the reason he would not work miracles among them. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Enraged, they “drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.”
Archbishop Richard Smith began his homily by pointing to the Freedom Convoy of truckers in Ottawa opposing vaccine mandates. “I raise this not in order to offer a public comment on this particular demonstration,” he began. But then he did comment, politically and theologically, for his entire homily, on the trucker convoy.
In his analogy, the archbishop cast the truckers and protesters objecting to vaccine mandates as the rebellious and hard-hearted, angry mob, both groups forming “a convoy of resistance” rejecting God’s “divine directives.”
Following this line of thought, though Smith didn’t say so explicitly, it is the reviled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who slipped out of town that is the persecuted Christ, and the fast-tracked injections from the pharmaceutical corporations that are mandated by heaven where … the Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates types live?
“Far from inhibiting freedom, obedience to divine mandates is liberty’s necessary prerequisite,” the archbishop said.
That is a statement we know as Catholics to be true; following God’s laws and the truth leads to freedom. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” says the Lord.
What is stunning, is how the archbishop applied this truth to something as wholly illegitimate and corrupt as an elitist, authoritarian, anti-Christian government subjecting its people to unlawful injection mandates. He even used the phrase “divine mandate” in connection with a tyranny that violates the most fundamental principles of medical ethics, the Nuremberg Code, and the concept of informed consent to medical procedures.
Vaccine mandates across this country have created a government-persecuted segment of society. Many of the persecuted are out of a job. They are barred from hospitals, unable to board a plane or train, banned from restaurants, demonized by the government, and shunned by the people who obey.
In the province of Quebec, this segment includes faithful Catholics whose bishops have capitulated to the state, making it impossible for them to receive Holy Communion in their churches. They are effectively excommunicated, pushed out of the Church like lepers—the lepers that Jesus embraced.
Many of the Canadians who have taken the shots were forced to violate their own free will and consciences; they’ve been coerced, like prisoners, by government diktats, a reality at which our Catholic consciences should revolt and our bishops should rise to oppose.
The holdouts are people legitimately wary of the side effects for themselves or their children, people who’ve seen the government manipulate data from the beginning and piggyback undemocratic, globalist Build Back Better agendas onto a public health crisis. They don’t trust an emergency that lasts two years, continuously moving goalposts, and a hypocritical Prime Minister who would divide his country and smear tens of thousands of his citizens with hate language like “misogynist” and “racist,” and laughably dismiss the millions supporting the truckers as a “small fringe minority” holding “unacceptable views.”
Sadly, our Catholic leaders dismiss them, too.
“It is bad enough that the government has been lying to the people about the medical situation and has been doing so from the very outset. It is worse that the bishops are still pretending not to know this,” writes Douglas Farrow on Substack.
“It is far worse yet that they are willing to set layman against layman by having one refuse another access to the altar; that they are setting up a den of coppers in the temple of God.”
Our Catholic leaders have conformed our churches beyond what the government diktats demand. At Walmart you can walk in maskless, but if a church is open there are Kapos—as Farrow refers to them—at the door, dispensing globs of toxic hormone-disrupting chemicals on the children’s hands, making sure the congregants answer the questions, stand on the X, and sit distanced in the sanitized space.
The congregation is told that this is vital, lifesaving work, while the majority—the parishioners who have left—see it as obsessive, germaphobic hand-sanitizing and virtue signaling. That and a pharisaical filtering of the people who have come to God’s altar.
What’s so upside down about the bishops’ response to this pandemic, is the obliviousness—hardness, actually—to the suffering caused by these COVID lockdowns and mandates that they have embraced. For two years, they have petitioned the Lord at Mass for the politicians and public health experts, the victims of COVID and the heroic frontline workers (who should have included the truckers who put food on their tables while they closed their doors and went home).
Where were their prayers for the 10,000 children who starved to death—excess deaths every month under government and church-sanctioned lockdowns? Or for those thousands of elderly people—a third of all COVID deaths during the pandemic—left to die alone, without the sacraments, and in dreadful circumstances because of government and church-sanctioned abandonment?
Hundreds of thousands of family businesses went bankrupt in Canada, and thousands of breadwinners continue to lose jobs from continued lockdowns as well as mandates. Researchers have described an economic shock wave from lockdowns that will dwarf COVID infection deaths and claim more than 800,000 American lives in the long run, particularly those of African Americans and women, as a result of the “stay safe” measures enforced also by our Church.
What have our Church leaders said about the teens and young adults dying from opioids and addicted to Tik Tok in Church-approved isolation? Why didn’t the Church pray for the children whose freedom was stolen? The children traumatized because they are forced to muzzle their mouths for eight hours a day at school and socialized to believe they could kill their grandparents? Children forced to take warp speed “novel” injections for a disease that does not affect them?
“’Public health’ and ‘the safety of our children’ came to mean students Zooming from homeless encampments, experiencing severe abuse, regressing academically, falling into depression, going hungry, struggling through catastrophic learning loss, and, in the saddest cases, not making it through the year alive,” Alex Gutentag wrote in the Tablet.
Mental illness, sometimes leading to suicide, in young girls particularly, continues to soar.
One of the Canadians on Parliament Hill this past week was the mother of a girl who committed suicide during a lockdown. Since the anti-Catholic, pro-abortion legacy media that the bishops listen to has decided to “dehumanize” the protesters, there is no reporting of this story anywhere, so we know from a live feed only that the girl’s name was Mila Newfield and that her mother has plastered a little car with her pictures and driven to Ottawa to show the health and safety people what they did to her child. And to thank the truckers for seeing her tragedy and fighting for other children.
Our bishops have not said a whisper about these people. They seem to gloss over them like they don’t exist—like those injured by the fast-tracked injections from the pharmaceutical giants who have decades of experience hiding bodies killed by their products. The bishops seem never to have heard of the US government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) which has collected 1,209,421 adverse event reports for COVID shots, including 41,163 permanent disabilities and 23,149 deaths reported as of January 28—more deaths than for all vaccines since the system launched in 1988.
Like the media, our religious leaders ignore victims like Catholic Jessica Berg, a healthy 37-year-old stay-at-home mom who didn’t want a COVID vaccine but took it because she had to for her volunteer position with kids. She died of a blood clotting disorder linked to the shots.
There are thousands of stories like Berg’s and thousands more about the dispossessed. These are the people that the truckers are defending. This is why the trucker revolution has filled Parliament Hill and captivated the world. This is why Justin Trudeau and his diktats are so despised, and why the Catholic churches are so empty. Still.
Our bishops who talk endlessly about social justice have had nothing to say about the world catastrophe or the personal tragedies like this. They repeat mantras like “Safe and Effective” and “Follow the Science.” But like the public health experts (who before COVID were pushing condoms, sex ed, and puberty blockers on pre-teens), they give no data. They don’t point to actual science.
Are we just to follow secular humanist Tony Fauci who says “I am science” like Jesus declaring himself the Son of God? Are we to obey the science that extracts organs from freshly aborted late-term babies? Or Gain-of-Function science that weaponizes viruses? Fauci science that puts beagles in boxes to be consumed by sandflies? Or Theresa Tam Science that advises people to have the “lowest risk sexual activity” – alone—during COVID-19?
May we instead follow the science from John Hopkins University researchers showing conclusively that lockdowns caused more deaths than they saved lives? Or the empirical evidence that children’s carbon dioxide levels escalate to dangerous, potentially brain-damaging levels within minutes of applying a face mask? Or the Great Barrington Declaration, endorsed by nearly a million researchers, doctors, and public health experts, which the lying, pro-abortion, anti-Catholic legacy media have blacked out?
The science shows what is now obvious to anyone who is honest: COVID vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission and may actually make things worse. Our fully vaccinated prime minister is a case in point, since he recently was infected and is apparently infectious, requiring isolation—unless, of course, he is lying. In any case, there can be no herd immunity from coronavirus. The whole segregation business is scientifically untenable.
We are now in the absurd situation that an unvaccinated 12-year-old, at zero risk from COVID, can be barred from his hockey team because he hasn’t had Pfizer’s myocarditis-inducing shots, while a symptomatic, COVID-positive, vaccinated healthcare worker can go to the nursing home. This is the science the bishops follow and want the laity to blindly follow, too.
It’s against this backdrop that our Church leaders seem to be clearly aligned with the rest of the political and economic elite of the world, those at Davos and the World Economic Forum, who are insulated from all this government-induced suffering.
Like the elite who have profited from the greatest wealth transfer in history during the pandemic, the Catholic Church leaders seem to have gross conflicts of interest. The Bishop of Rome entertained wealthy Rothschilds and held secret meetings with Pfizer’s chief who paid himself $29 million dollars last year from his company’s $33 billion in COVID shot profits. The Church in the United States calmly collected more than $3 billion in taxpayers’ dollars from taxpaid pandemic funds in the US alone. Why should these elite care about our bankruptcies? How could they even understand?
And yet the archbishop from Edmonton paints the truckers as the mob. The waitresses and moms and hairdressers and hockey dads, those who have lost their livelihoods and freedom and their God-given right to medical informed consent for their children, are described from the pulpit as hordes of hard hearts. And Jesus Christ is depicted as friend to globalists and prime ministers and billionaires and bishops.
