What Does The Toronto Case Tell Us About Incompetence?

The no-holy-communion-in-Toronto story, while it didn't make Fox News, did cause a stir in Catholic social media. It's been fast-moving, with new aspects developing almost every day since July 3. Here's what I think is a drone's eye view from 1000 feet or so (corrections and additions welcoe):

• The Toronto health department published "Guidelines for Houses of Worship" on June 20. At the top of the bullet item list was a prohibition on any activities related to holy communion.
• We must assume that a great deal of thought went into these guidelines, by the best experts in the public health field. Those issued on June 20 must have been the product of weeks of work.
• By several accounts, Orthodox and Roman Catholic bishops were also working closely with the same public health experts to develop their own reopening guidelines.
• Cdl Collins issued guidelines for the Archdiocese of Toronto on June 29 that fully encompassed the celebration and distribution of holy communion. I am assured that Cdl Collins would not have issued such guidelines without the full consultation and approval of the Toronto health department.
• Published accounts indicate that Greek Orthodox authorities participated in equivalent consultations, and their guidelines were approved by the health department as well.
• However,the published health department policy as of July 3 continued to be the June 20 guidelines prohibiting holy communion, which remained posted until July 8.
• On July 3, a citizen made a complaint to the Toronto health department that a Greek Orthodox parish was celebrating holy communion in violation of published guidelines. We may assume this complaint was made in good faith, and the complainant had been unaware of the behind-the-scenes approvals.
• The complaint resulted in an inspector visiting the Orthodox parish and issuing some type of violation to the priest. We must assume the inspector was also unaware of the actual health department policy, which was unpublished and behind the scenes.
• This resulted in a stir in Catholic social media over the July 4 weekend, drawing attention to the published health department policy prohibiting holy communion.
• In addition, a non-profit called the Greek Community of Toronto owns several Greek Orthodox parish properties there. The parish that was cited for violating the published policy was one of these.
• The non-profit, presumably out of prudence and concern for potential liability and other legal problems with the properties it owned, told its parishes to stop offering holy communion.
• The non-profit also asked the Orthodox bishop and the health department for clarification. Neither responded.
• Catholic social media continued to cover the story. I did here.
• On July 8, the Toronto health department quietly updated its published policy to remove any reference to prohibiting holy communion. It substituted words to the effect that the policy would come from behind the scenes talks with the health director.
• Various people e-mailed me to say that, in trying to stay on top of the developing story and timeline, I had it all wrong and was misleading people.

Another factor is what I'v learned from a lifetime of knowing Canadians. Decades ago, I participated in an early on-line forum on rail technology. The question came up of why Canadian railways had heated boxcars, when the things you normally ship in boxcars, shoes or dishwashers, say, tolerate cold very well.

I mentioned that other commodities, like beer, also ship in boxcars, but beer mustn't be allowed to freeze. One Canadian participant took vigorous offense at my implication that any Canadian city would consume so much beer that it would need to be shipped in boxcars. Another Canadian complained that only American beer was so bad it couldn't freeze. Over seven decades, I've learned some Canadians are like that. (I have another story that ends, "No, the mounties would never permit it.")

I have a certain sense that the Canadian visitors who've taken me to task for covering this story are reacting in some way to an implication that people are grossly incompetent on both sides of the border, not just in Houston. So be it.

Let's look at this. A major job function for any manager or leader is to communicate effectively. A public health director must certainly communicate health regulations and practices effectively, since his job is to protect lives. Just as we instinctively expect certain attention to duty from a ship's captain, we have nearly as many expectations of a public health director, certainly that policies and regulations be current. If they aren't the health department isn't doing its job and loses credibility.

The Toronto health department, with an unbelievably tin ear, issued a policy that it apparently understood from the start wasn't accurate, since at the same time it published the policy, late June, it was in talks at least with Catholic and Orthodox bishops that would allow holy communion to be celebrated.

I've worked as a policy writer at various times. If I'd been on the project, I would have said something like, "Hey shouldn't we be updating the published policy to reflect that you can get holy communion approved if you palaver with Dr Schmidlap?" But then, that's why I would not have been on that project.

Instead, the health department got a black eye and bad press, it caused completely unnecessary controversy in the Toronto Greek community, it apparently did not respond to requests from the Greek community for clarification, and in the end, it had to quietly update its policy.

There should have been a public apology. That there wasn't indicates nothing will change in the Toronto health department, and I suspect in many health departments on both sides of the border. (By the way, where's the report on what happened when the Lethbridge police took down the Star Wars trooper?)

I suddenly woke up last night and realized there's a problem with the truism attributed to Napoleon, that where incompetence is a sufficient explanation, no other explanation is necessary. The fallacy here is the same as the fallacy in the secularist argument that where the laws of physics are sufficient explanation for the movement of the planets, no other explanation is necessary.

In both cases, the question is the same. But where do the laws of physics come from? By the same token, where does incompetence come from? It's there in the Toronto health department. Where does it come from?

More On Toronto; San Francisco Controversies

I've received several e-mails and reports from visitors that tell me the situation in Toronto is at best unclear. As of late yesterday, the Toronto Department of Public Health issued new guidelines, dated July 8, 2020, that are far less speciric in their restrictions, such as

• Communion and other close contact activities as advised by Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health.
• All social gatherings, including before or after the service, as advised by Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Halth.

There is now no equivalent policy specifically prohibiting communion-related activities. At the same time, my regular correspondent sent me guidelines from the Archdiocese of Toronto datd June 29, 2020, a little over a week after the earlier June 20 Toronto Public Health guidelines I linked yesterday before the new July 8 guidelines were posted, that simply outline protocols for Holy Communion and other activities without reference to those that apparently were in effect from the health department. These were followed the weekend of July 5, apparently without complaint by the health department.

While my regular correspondent suggests yesterday's post was "misleading", it was based on a then-current published policy and various media reports reacting to that policy. The situation in Toronto, as elsewhere, is at best confusing. A visitor forwarded a letter from a member of the Greek Orthodox community in Toronto reporting that the health department did try to enforce its June 20 guidelines with an Orthodox parish:

The past few months and especially the last few weeks have been challenging and confusing to all of us. The Greek Community of Toronto (“GCT”) would like to clarify and explain its stance to the most recent developments in terms of the re-opening of the Churches and its practices. Once the City of Toronto allowed places of worship to re-open, the GCT with respect to the Greek Orthodox faith and at the same time its obligation to adhere to the City of Toronto, opened its churches to the public while following and implementing the guidelines provided. Unfortunately, the City of Toronto Public Health guidelines dated June 20, 2020 intervene with the practices of the Church and because of that there seems to have been a lot of confusion. In order to provide clarity, below you will find a series of factual events as they occurred and forced the GCT to restrict some of the Greek Orthodox practices in its churches.

On Friday July 3, 2020 a Toronto Public Health inspector visited St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church. This was a result of a complaint received regarding a breach of the Covid-19 Guidance for Places of Worship that was amended as of June 20, 2020 (See below). According to the inspector St. Demetrios Church has been compliant with all the requirements as stated by Toronto Public Health except the suspension of communion and kissing of the priest's hand.

The inspector was informed that the Archdiocese of Canada is responsible for providing the rules and procedures to all the priests. This was done through a letter dated June 9, 2020 by the Archdiocese of Canada and did not indicate the suspension of communion. The inspector made it clear that the GCT will be held liable if there is a Covid-19 case in its premises.

On the same day, following the inspection, the GCT sent an email to the Archbishop Sotirios requesting to follow the guidelines as set by the amended June 20, 2020 Covid-19 Guidance for Places of Worship (see below). Subsequently, the GCT also sent an email to Dr. Vinita Dubey, Associate Medical Officer of Health for Toronto Public Health asking for clarification regarding the matter of communion in which the Archdiocese of Canada was informed (see below).

The letter seems to conclude with a suggestion that there has been no clear response from either the archbishop or the health department, but now the health department has changed its guidance.

The fact is that in many cases, at least in North America, public health authorities have issued unclear, conflicting, and constantly changing guidance. It appears that both Catholic and Orthodox bishops in Toronto proceeded on a set of assumptions that,. quite possibly without being aware of it, were in conflict with published guidance. "Violations" of this guidance weren't consistently enforced. At some point, behind-the-scenes "consultations" seem to have taken place and sorta-kinda cleared things up in a way that saved face for the public health experts.

UPDATE: It appears from this account that Toronto public health authorities gave informal approval to some Orthodox clergy that communion would be OK, but nobody communicated this generally, and in particular it doesn't appear that the inspector who issued the violation was aware of the policy exception (if that is what it was). I wonder if the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto had received similar back-channel assurances. This, of course, is no way to conduct public policy.

A similar case has occurred in San Francisco (thanks to a visitor for the link):

The Archdiocese of San Francisco is pledging to comply with the city and county public health orders barring indoor public Masses and limiting outdoor services, including funerals, to 12 people.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent a letter June 29 to the archdiocese’ lawyer, ordering the archdiocese to cease-and-desist indoor public Masses and giving it one day to comply.

“Upon reviewing the reports of multiple San Francisco parishes holding indoor Mass over the last few weeks, the Health Officer has concluded that the Archdiocese is putting not only its parishioners but the larger community at risk of serious illness and death,” the letter said.

The archdiocese told CNA today that it has made a good-faith effort to comply with the city’s public health guidelines, despite some occasional confusion and last-minute changes to the city’s public health orders.

“Our intention has always been to conform to what we understand to be the City orders and timelines,” the archdiocese said, noting that the city’s orders have been constantly changing throughout the pandemic, sometimes on short notice, the archdiocese said July 2.

The problem is that quite often, public health authorities issue arbitrary "guidelines" that on one hand are unenforceable and at best subject to inconsistent enforcement efforts. They are poorly publicized and poorly understood by the affected parties, by the public, and even by the enforcement authorities. "Complaints" are made either by people intending only to cause disruption, or members of the public who don't understand the guidelines or the most recent updates.

As far as I can see, bishops in both San Francisco and Toronto have made good-faith efforts to comply with poorly publicized and constantly changing directives, which are both arbitrary and ineffective even from a public health standpoint. For instance, the San Francisco directives limit mass attendance to a dozen, while in most of the rest of the state, it's 100. There's no real basis for either number.

The basic problem is that health departments decided in March that they could run the world, and the results have been predictable. Efforts to give control of the world back to the responsible authorities have ben halting and pusillanimous. Again, I'm not sure how this ends up.

No Holy Communion In Toronto

I think it's plain to just about anyone whose livelihood doesn't depend on adhering to the conventional wisdom that "reopening", with its associated phases, masks, social distancing, and scrupulous protocols on who may sell a drink to whom, if standing, seated the bar, seated and consuming food, or just outside, has been nothing but an elaborate face-saving exercise for the public health establishment, which has effectively destroyed its credibility in the COVID episode.

A very good example of the late phase of this movement can be found in Toronto's June 20, 2020 COVID-19 Guidance for Places of Worship:

Faith communities have continued their work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with the exception of inperson gatherings at their place of worship, since these were prohibited by provincial order as part of an unprecedented effort to contain the spread of the virus. In-person gatherings for prayer and worship are now permitted with certain conditions, as described in this guidance document.

This oozes condescension. "Faith communities" get a pat on the head for continuing their "work", which presumably was not much more than social services at a reduced scale, since the State had forbidden gatherings, sabbath observance, or sacraments. But now the State will allow limited gatherings for the sabbath, as long as sacraments aren't involved:

• Suspend all communion-related activities as advised by Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health.
• Suspend all social gatherings, including those that occur before or after the service, as advised by Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health.
• Suspend food services at this time.
• Participation of religious services is limited to no more than 30% of the capacity of your premises.

This, I think, is an indication of the residual English influence on Canadian culture, where the State clearly has primacy over religious activities and is specifying liturgical practice every bit as much as Parliament tried to do in passing legislation on vestments in the 19th century. Regulations by the State directed specifically at "houses of worship" have been more successfully challenged in the US.

The problem is that as the manufactured crisis persists, the basis for such continued restrictions is subject to ever-greater question, on the basis of "science" and consistency alone.

Up to now, for instance, the whole rationale behind masks, six-foot social distancing, and no singing in church has been that COVID is spread through droplets. But just a week ago, according to the link, "240 Scientists Say Coronavirus Can Be Spread Through the Air":

WHO guidance says the coronavirus is transmitted primarily between people through larger respiratory droplets and contact, and maintaining distance and sanitizing hands and surfaces are the ways to stop infections.

More experts are beginning to disagree, and they say more than hand-washing will be needed to prevent the virus from spreading.

"Hand-washing and social distancing are appropriate, but in our view, insufficient to provide protection from virus-carrying respiratory microdroplets released into the air by infected people. This problem is especially acute in indoor or enclosed environments, particularly those that are crowded and have inadequate ventilation," the letter said.

The story isn't clear on what we're supposed to do with this new information, but if it's true, all the masks and social distancing and don't-go-to-the-beach are just a big never mind. The problem for the conventional wisdom is that if the plebs begins to understand this, the whole rationale for the crisis restrictions will be seen to have been superstitious. The public health establishment doesn't put it quite that way:

He said there is also a concern people will stop doing other things they need to do to prevent transmission, such as washing hands, staying apart and cleaning surfaces, if they think the virus is airborne.

But again, if the virus spreads through the air and not through droplets, then masks and all the other stuff aren't effective. So what are we supposed to do instead? The establishment proposes no substitute.

The bottom line seems to be that the disease is infecting more and more people, 75%-80% with no or very mild symptoms, and 95%-99% of whom survive no matter what, especially as medications prove effective. The rationale for masks and everything else had been that they bent the curve. But on one hand, the curve isn't bending, and on the other, it seems to matter less and less anyhow.

The conundrum for public health authorities is that as "cases" increase so rapidly, the mortality rate decreases just as rapidly, to the point that the CDC is on the verge of declaring COVID is no longer an epidemic.

So naturally, public health authorities are renewing their efforts to micromanage everything. This is increasingly unenforceable, specially as political authorities tacitly encouraged thousands of people to disregard social distancing during the recent protests. My estimate is that as incubation periods end, there will be no increase in deaths as a result, and in fact during weeks following the protests, deaths continue to decline.

At some point, this will make social distancing measures, including liturgical micromanagement from State authorities, harder and harder to justify. But the State, often irrespective of the political alignment of governments, is clearly reluctant to surrender power the people thought they were surrendering on a voluntary, temporary basis during an unprecedented crisis. How this eventually ends is anyone's guess.

The UK Friends Of The Ordinariate

A visitor very kindly sent me the latest issue of what appears to be a quarterly magazine published by the UK Friends of the Ordinariate, that being the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. This is Issue 12, the Summer 2020 edition, which, since it's on a regular schedule and right on time, sets it apart from the US Ordinariate Observer. It stands apart in many other ways. The website of the UK Friends of the Ordinariate is here.

There's a lot to notice, and it's hard to know where to start. On page 3, there's a message from the group's chairman, Peter Sefton-Williams. He says,

In recent months the "Friends" have responded to significant calls for financial assistance from the Ordinariate.

The biggest outlay has been two grants, each of £8,000, continuing our support for two recently ordained priests, Fr Mason in Eastbourne and Fr Creer in Salisbury. We have also responded to a request for £11,000 towards the production of the "Divine Worship -- Daily Office" books which will be co-funded by the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross in Australia. In addition we have recently provided £10,000 towards the restoration of the organ at the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Borough, London, and granted £5,000 to help secure a new presbytery in Pembury, Kent. Other grants have included a contribution towards the provision of a common set of purple chasubles for all Ordinariate clergy, support for an Ordinariate seminarian and a contribution towards the university fees of two Ordinariate priests working towards a Doctorate.

Thanks to your generosity, we have been able to meet all these requests in full.

There is simply no equivalent support group for the North American ordinariate, it goes without saying. There are second collections for seminarians, but no group of at least mid-level donors systematically raising funds for such a purpose, and certainly not to restore church buildings or organs, or purchase consistent sets of chasubles.

The North American ordinariate, for whatever reason, is not co-funding the Daily Office book, while the much smaller Australian ordinariate is. What's the story there? Sounds like Msgr Reid has been effective since his arrival.

And I simply don't know how to get my head around the idea that two UK ordinariate priests are pursuing doctorates, with a volunteer group helping to pay their fees. I have nothing else to say there.

The only effort remotely equivalent to the UK Friends in North America is the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, which over eight years has proved a feckless effort, and the fecklessness is due in large measure to its narcissism. Its blog is nothing more than a vehicle for self-congratulation by a small clique.

But beyond the evidence of a serious group of committed core donors, the effort in the publication itself is remarkable. There is an intelligent discussion of Ronald Knox and biographies of several Elizabethan convert priests and martyrs, among other articles. Nobody connected with the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is remotely capable of anything at this level, nor is anybody in Houston.

Why the difference? A visitor recently sent me a copy of an essay by Fr Aidan Nichols, OP, The Realm, which argues, not entirely in jest, for a re-establishment of Catholicism as the established Church in England. I get the impression that for people like the UK Friends, this is something not far from a living option to work for, and they see a reason to put significant time and treasure to achieve it.

In the US, and almost certainly Canada as well, this is nothing like the remotest possibility. In addition, there are almost no North American Anglican Papalist landmarks or church buildings that carry equivalent antiquarian interest, and other Catholic major donors are funding diocesan projects in that sort of direction.

But even taking such differences into account, I'm left with a stunning contrast. In North America, we have a record most visibly of a tinhorn self-promoter, Fr Phillips, a limited number of priests who've tried unsuccesfully to replicate his tinhorn formula, and another limited number of journeymen who are trying to clean up after Phillips and keep something going for another few years.

By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.

Indianapolis Update

Following up on inquiries from a diocesan visitor to this blog from Indianapolis, my regular correspondent has discovered that Fr Moore celebrated his first Divine Worship mass at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis yesterday. As we read in the bulletin, he is also assisting at Good Shepherd, Indianapolis. It had been reported here that he would only be doing hospital chaplain work there.

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any announcement from any ordinariate source on Fr Moore's assignment in Indianapolis. The status of the Divine Worship mass there is unique, with a group no longer listed on the ordinariate parish finder on the web site, but an ordinariate priest now serving in the area.

I was looking over the “Parish finder” on the web site to refresh my memory on this subject and noted, not for the first time, how poorly maintained and misleading it is. St Margaret, Katy is still there despite its closure having been officially announced months ago now. On the other hand, St Joseph of Arimathea, Indianapolis is long gone, despite the fact that a Divine Worship mass continues to be celebrated at Holy Rosary every Sunday. Christ the King, Tyendinaga has also disappeared from the list, although I gather that a local diocesan priest says mass for the group once a month—-a similar situation to that of St Gregory the Great, Mobile, which is still on the list. Strange.

As I've said here now and then, my experience of incompetence after a career of seeing it has been that, as opposed to random inadvertencies, incompetence is something habitual and ingrained, and it exists in organizations where those in authority actively foster it. If the powers that be don't want the bungling or nonfeasance, they'll fix things so they don't happen.

A parish finder exists so people who want to learn where to attend a nearby ordinariate group can find one. If it's kept up to date, it's an indication the ordinariate wants to do everything it can to encourage new members. If it isn't, it's an indication that making the sacraments available to new laity isn't a priority. I think we've learned over eight years where Houston's priorities lie.

For that matter, I believe it's been over a year -- someone may correct me here -- since an Ordinariate Observer has been published. Certainly there's been no public announcement for the ordinariate as a whole of the personnel moves in recent weeks, which is routine on diocesan web sites.

In fact, this blog is pretty much the only public source of current information on the ordinariate. The Indianapolis diocesan visitor, after all, e-mailed me, not Houston, to find out what was going on with Fr Moore, and by the way was curious as to why the heck I'm doing this.

You 're welcome, Bp Lopes.

So, What Happens Next?

My wife and I saw an unexpected result of the current manufactured crises last evening during the July 4 holiday. Earlier in the week, California Gov Newsom prohibited public fireworks displays as part of his rollback of reopening measures. The difficulty with rolling things back on just days notice is that public fireworks displays aren't just pickup activities. They're expensive, they involve professionals, and they require weeks and months of planning.

Our house is located so we don't normally see public fireworks displays on the Fourth; hills, trees, and buildings intervene. We do hear a fairly constant crackle of (illegal in the city) individual fireworks every year. This year, the crackle increased to something more like a roar. This morning I saw a news report that the 911 lines were overwhelmed with complaints of illegal fireworks. But beyond that, for the first time ever, we saw a display of organized, expensive professional fireworks from our windows. UPDATE: This happened all over the state. The LA massive violations are covered here and here.

In other words, in the face of the governor's prohibition of public fireworks displays, we had both in-your-face professional public displays and even more illegal amateur fireworks than usual. I read reports of situations in other states where businesses are suing their governors for shutdown orders on just days notice, when shutting down and reopening require planning and can't be imposed or reversed on a whim. Clearly this sort of\ green light-red light arbitrary control isn't going to work over any medium term. Either the courts will stop it or there will be massive disobedience.

Looking into the nature of the statistics being used to justify a "spike" in the COVID "pandemic", it appears to me that in part, it's an artifact of increased testing. Estimates are that at least 5%-10% of the population is infected, though others suggest it could be much higher, that COVID has been in the country much longer than believed, but the vast majority of infections have been either asymptomatic or with very mild symptoms.

Two problems with reports on "cases" are connected with this. One is that reports of "cases" don't separate current or very recent infections from the presence of antibodies. Those with recent infections within a 14-day period may be contagious, but it isn't clear whether this includes people without symptoms. (If they aren't coughing or sneezing, how do they infect?) Those now with antibodies are now immune and contribute to herd immunity.

But second, reports of "cases" may or may not subdivide the totals into "confirmed" and "probable". "Confirmed" simply means there has been a positive test, whether of infection or antibody. But "probable" simply cooks up a number on the assumption that anyone who tested positive may have infected x number of other people, which is just a fudge factor being used to inflate the numbers. Nothing "probable" about it!

Finally, I note that reports of hospitalizations refer to hospitalizations "with" COVID, which appears to be used the same way deaths "with" COVID have been reported: deaths for any reason, suicide, heart attack, overdose, or whatever, were reported as deaths "with" COVID if the person had a positive test for the virus. Hospitalizations "with" COVID are apparently the same thing. Since COVID tests are now routine for any hospitalization for any reason, this is simply inflating the numbers to manufacture a crisis.

It's entirely possible that states, even those with Republican governors, will try to reimpose lockdowns based on a manufactured "spike" in the virus. But just as the March lockdowns lost credibility as mass graves somehow didn't appear in public parks and the hospital ships and field hospitals went unused, I've got to assume there will be a similar effect if lockdowns are reimposed, added to the "fool me once" factor from the first lockdown.

Abp Gómez, who is head of the USCCB, is no dummy, and my impression of the men who surround him in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is similar. I've got to assume the bishops who are on the ball will be working on a strategy to deal with these developments. The bottom line is that we will likely see attempts to reimpose a prohibition on in-person masses, with an equivalent loss of credibility for such government measures as the renewed lockdowns on one hand don't control the spread of the virus, while on the other, the actual impact of the virus continues to be relatively small.

The question I really have, though, is if COVID was the result of some Chinese attempt to weaponize a biological agent that escaped from the lab (and I simply have no opinion on this), the weapon they devised didn't do a very good job.

California Bans Singing In Church

Throughout the past week, Gov Newsom has issued a series of orders rolling back California's reopening due to what corporate media calls a "resurgence" in COVID, although the key figure used to justify lockdowns in March continues to decline, as depicted in the graph I found on this site (click on the image for a larger copy):

However, corporate media has shifted the narrative from deaths and hospitalizations to "cases", which means positive tests. Dr Fauci, who was forced repeatedly to reduce his estimates of COVID deaths in March, now predicts there could be 100,000 new "cases" per day unless, you guessed it, we do lots of stuff to "bend the curve".

It's oddly difficult to find stories that have any level of detail on how many people tested for COVID have no symptoms, but the most current ones I can find from the past week, like this one, give numbers in the 75-80% range. But despite the increasing number of "cases", according to the CDC, for the week ending June 27,

Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 9.0% during week 25 to 5.9% during week 26, representing the tenth week of a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC. The percentage is currently at the epidemic threshold but will likely change as more death certificates are processed, particularly for recent weeks. Nobody has called for the hospital ships, which were hardly used at all, to come back to New York or LA.

In other words, even by the CDC's account, despite skyrocketing numbers of positive tests, the COVID death rate has continued to decline. It seems to me that this indicates, if anything, that we're moving toward herd immunity without a vaccine. Yet even red state governors are being stampeded into reversing reopenings.

That California Gov Newsom would see this manufactured "spike" as an excuse to reimpose controls specifically meant for "houses of worship" is an iffy situation. According to the Sacramento Bee,

Unlike the restaurant closures, Newsom said little about the new guidelines on houses of worship, mentioning them only in passing during a press conference Thursday.

It remains to be seen if, or how, the state or counties are expected to enforce the ban on singing in houses of worship. Churches were among the most aggressive institutions in pushing back on Newsom’s original stay-at-home order in mid-March. Several sued the governor to overturn the order, saying it violated their First Amendment rights, although none were successful in court.

This misstates the case. In both California and Illinois, the states withdrew their specific restrictions on "houses of worship" when the plaintiffs sought injunctions from the US Supreme Court. A repeat of this process could bring the same result, or a different case could in fact result in an injunction.

The problem for an authoritarian corporate state is that religious organizations represent a social network outside of state control. The accounts I've read from Nazi Germany indicate that, although you'd be deported to camps if you were a Red or a Jew, Catholics were a group subject to a second tier of suspicion, and Catholics had routine visits from the Gestapo. Accounts from military officers indicate that being an active Catholic could be a serious threat to one's career and position.

What we see is that, although the corporate state has been forced temporarily to tolerate limited physical gatherings of the faithful under heavily circumscribed conditions, it is using public health justifications to chip away at even these.

A possible remedy will be a more broadly based strategy derived from a natural rights approach. A recent Illinois case shows promise:

A southern Illinois judge on Thursday voided Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker’s Coronavirus lockdown orders.

The Illinois Attorney General’s office is expected to appeal.

Pritzker first declared a statewide disaster because of Coronavirus back in early March and continued to issue 30 day extensions — he has used the disaster proclamations in his restrictions in each ‘reopening phase’ dubbed “Restore Illinois.”

. . . Judge Michael McHaney on Thursday said state law does not give governors the authority to extend disaster proclamations past 30 days or activities and businesses via executive order.

The precise legal justification for variations on lockdown orders varies from state to state. Versions of this case are moving through courts in at least Michigan and Pennsylvania. The precise legal questions will inge on the state's authority to limit constitutional (or natural) rights on various pretexts.

Again, natural law and natural rights are a key basis for Catholic moral philosophy. This approach was key to Pope St John Paul in overthrowing Stalinism. Catholics can play an important role here as well.