This is the season of rebirth.. the light.. the way.

The Christian faith rejoices ‘He Is Risen’ as church bells signal celebration on Easter Sunday morning..

Not this year…
Those church bells have gone silent, replaced with online live streams for the faithful who are banned from walking into houses of worship..

Pope Francis presided over what could only be described as a haunting Good Friday ceremony in an empty St. Peter’s Basilica…

The Pope watched from under a canopy on the steps of the basilica as 10 people – half from the Italian prison system and half from the Vatican’s health services – carried a cross and flaming torches towards him

The coronavirus pandemic restrictions have caused churches across America to keep their doors locked..

Some states are going further in keeping people away from attending worship ceremonies..

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has warned devout Christians that anyone attending Easter Sunday services will be forced to quarantine for 14 days after giving state police the mandate to take down attendees’ license plate numbers. That fired up a debate on the Coal Speaker Facebook page earlier today.

This move certainly raised some eyebrows… others shrugged their shoulders while actively reporting their neighbors on Facebook for walking outside in groups too large.. It’s a pandemic, after all… no rights apply anymore, no?

One commenter opined,

I find it odd that you can still go to the hardware store and buy a can of paint but you can’t sit in your church parking lot in your vehicle and listen to a sermon Bashir was busy suing our last Governor but has no qualms with stepping on your constitutional rights

Empty pews also means that church finances are going to struggle as well.

Michelle Conlin writes this in REUTERS:

Like most churches around the United States, St. Anselm’s will be closed on Sunday, its members unable to gather and its priests unable to meet with them as the nation endures its worst public-health crisis in a century.
But just as American churches have been unable to meet their members’ spiritual needs — perhaps most painfully represented in the absence of public funerals for the thousands who have died — they also have faced their own unmet needs in the form of untouched collection baskets.
“We are in uncharted waters, financially,” said John Quaglione, a St. Anselm’s parishioner who is also a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. “There will be some serious conversations and some strong conversations with the parishes and the economic folks to help get us through this.”
Easter Sunday is one of the biggest donation days of the year for U.S. churches, due largely to the spikes in attendance they typically see, according to church officials and nonprofit groups.
Even before health guidance shuttered most U.S. churches, many were struggling financially. Just half of Americans reported belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque in 2018, according to Gallup polling, down from 70% two decades earlier. Those who attend services go more erratically, according to the Pew Research Center, leaving fewer people to fill collection baskets.

But you can stream online!

Are churches swift enough to adapt to Paypal and donate buttons!?

The Roman Empire doesn’t move that fast.

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SOLACE IN HISTORY

If you have followed this website since its inception more than a decade ago, you may know that we find solace in history.. The notion that uncharted waters exist could be scary.. but when you see we went through this before, it becomes a little less frightening and easier for the mind to digest..

On November 3, 1918, the Pittsburgh POST-GAZETTE reported that the state was actively telling churches to close in order to help stop the spread of the Spanish Flu..

In Duquesne:

But it was not just one week.. it was week after week.

Perusing papers of the times, it seems as though churches decided to take it week by week instead of closing for a long period of time. Each new week they announced Sunday mass was delayed until the next week.. and so on..

From the READING TIMES on November 4, 1918, the paper reported that Lebanon churches were closed… Schools were too. Also in the paper, Mahanoy City schools remained closed… the town reported 225 flu deaths in the town in October 1918, and “51 women were made widows, and 252 children made orphans, losing their father or mother or both.”

Also in the same READING TIMES paper that day was a short little snippet that seems other-worldly..

There was a report of a “young women patient from Minersville” named Loretta Murphy… she was being treated for the Spanish Flu in the Pottsville Hospital when she “suddenly jumped out of bed at an early hour and walked out of a third-story window, her neck being broken in the fall” .. the paper declared that she was “delirious,” but not considered dangerously so..

Dateline the Hazleton “PLAIN SPEAKER” (God we had so many newspapers then) on October 19, 1918: Churches CLOSED.. and not reopening any time soon!

It did not stop in 1918..

Stories like these persisted well into 1919 as the second round of the Spanish Flu took hold in the United States..

THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

The past headlines showcase that we have been here before.. and sadly will be again. But today, we are living in this dystopian reality..

But there is something humbling to consider about COVID-19.. If this virus, the coronavirus, would have appeared in 1918, it would reportedly been FAR MORE DEADLY than the Spanish Flu at that time!

Scott Gottlieb from the FDA says so .. among the money quotes:

“I think it’s reasonable to surmise that anyone who gets admitted to a prolonged I.C.U. stay with COVID-19 who ends up getting intubated, [or] ends up getting prolonged critical care–that’s probably someone who would have died from the Spanish flu,” Gottlieb continued. “And if you do accept that assumption…if you say, some large proportion of people who are surviving COVID-19…would have died from Spanish flu, then COVID-19 not only looks like Spanish flu in terms of its distribution across the age range, but looks far more fearsome.”

He went on to say,

“China was not being forthcoming with information that could have helped us prepare,” Gottlieb said. “This virus has changed the course of history…The gravity of what this virus is going to mean to society for the next two years can’t be overstated, in my view, and this is the consequence of something that came out of China.”

Two takeaways. Thank God we are living in modern times.

And … second: We are living through history, one changing us from the ground up.. future shock.. and whatever else you think history books will call it.