Transcript:
We glory in tribulations, living the faith when public worship is prohibited, millions of Catholics in the so-called free Western world will, in the coming weeks or even months, and especially during Holy Week and Easter, the culmination of the entire liturgical year, be deprived of any public act of worship due to both civic and ecclesiastical reaction to the outbreak of coronavirus. The most painful and distressing of this is the deprivation of Holy Mass and sacramental Holy Communion. We currently experience the atmosphere of an almost planetary panic. The drastic and disproportionate security measures, with the denial of fundamental human rights of freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, and freedom of opinion, appear almost globally orchestrated along a precise plan.
An important side effect of this new sanitary dictatorship that is spreading throughout the world is the growing and uncompromising ban on all forms of public worship. The current situation of the prohibition of public worship in Rome brings the church back to the time of an analogous prohibition of Christian worship issued by the pagan Roman emperors in the first centuries. Clerics who dared to celebrate Holy Mass in the presence of the faithful in such circumstances could be punished or put in prison. Such a sanitary dictatorship has created a situation that releases the air of the catacombs, of a persecuted church, of an underground church, especially in Rome.
Pope Francis, who on March 15, with lonely and halting steps, walked through the deserted streets of Rome on his pilgrimage from the image of the Salus Populi Romani in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore to the miraculous cross in the church of San Marcello, conveyed an apocalyptic image. It was reminiscent of the following description of the third part of the secret of Fatima revealed on July 13, 1970: the Holy Father passed through a big city, half in ruins and half trembling with halting, stabbed, afflicted with pain and sorrow.
How should Catholics react and behave in such a situation? We have to accept this situation from the hands of divine providence as a trial which will bring us a greater spiritual benefit than if we had not experienced such a situation. One can understand this situation as a divine intervention in the current unprecedented crisis of the church. God uses the situation now to purify the church, to awaken the responsible in the church and, in the first place, the Pope and the episcopate, from the illusion of a nice modern world, from the temptation to flirt with the world, from the immersion in temporal and earthly things. The powers of this world have now forcibly separated the faithful from their shepherds. The clergy are ordered by governments to celebrate liturgy without the people.
This current purifying divine intervention has the power to show all of us what is truly essential in the church: the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christ with his body and blood, and the eternal salvation of immortal souls. May those in the church who are unexpectedly and suddenly deprived of what is central start to see and appreciate it.