by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

As Catholic we should know that we owe unquestioning obedience to God alone. But even with God, He does not expect us not to have questions. We can see this in His approval of Job, in the Book of Job, where at the end of the Book, He approves him for having shown Him the respect of asking questions and making complaints, rather than of his friends who never spoke to God, but only about God.

The reasons for this are profound and many.

On man’s part, because God created us — not just endowed us — with an intellectual soul, capable of knowing and thinking and reasoning, it does not offend God in the least, but rather pleases Him, when we use our minds to know the truth and understand the world around us and above us. God is no more offended when we think, than a father or mother are offended when they put their toddler in a crib full of playthings and he begins to play with them and chew on them and toss them here and there. This is why God made the world and why He put us into it.

On God’s part, because God is a God of light, not of darkness, He wants us to make decisions in the light.  That is, he wants us to make informed decisions, because those truly are the ones we fully consent to and thus merit thereby.  While it is true that we cannot fully grasp the Mysteries of God, wither pray and fidelity to God we can obtain the graces to understand all things of Heaven better, so as to act on our holy Faith with greater merit, than simply a blind obedience based on trust alone.

But in a civil state, whether it be officially Catholic and recognize Christ’s Kingship or whether it be founded upon non-Christian principles and governed by persons without reference to Jesus Christ, we can never owe our superiors unquestioning obedience.

This is true because men are fallible. And no man is infallible in decisions which regard the temporal order of things, not even the Pope!  The only exception is Jesus Christ, and you can see from His words in Scripture, that not even He gloried in telling men what to do in temporal affairs.

Thus, to our human superiors we should always have a little reserve of doubt and constantly check to see if what they are asking us to do is conformable to the will of God for ourselves and for others.

I remember one of my superiors in the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate trying to convince us young friars of his faulty notion of blind obedience. He gave us this example: while you cannot obey your superior if he orders you to rob a bank with him, you must obey him if he tells you to buy a gun legally, load it, drive him to a bank and stay outside with the car engine on and help him leave when he comes out, even if you think he might be robbing a bank, because it is wrong to doubt or question your superior!

I burst out laughing when he said that, and I left that Order to avoid that kind of criminality. Years later he left too, and the Catholic priesthood, and I am told he marries men who want to marry one another.

The Corona Panic was created by this false and excessive obedience in the same way.

As I commented the other day, no government of men has the authority to shut down a nation. And as I remarked today, the ethics of medical hygiene used in hospitals cannot be extended to the whole society.

These are obvious to someone grounded in reality. But they are not obvious to someone who has willfully blinded himself to get promoted, and who now exercises some authority in the civil government of your nation. He may be totally incapable of seeing the truth of them.

And therein lies the problem which was exploited by the Corona Hypers — my name for those who promote the hype that Corona is an existential threat to humanity.

The correct response of everyone, should be always, first, to demand proof for the commands of superiors which threaten the common good. And, second, to remind them that they have limits to their authority, and even when they have the authority to order something, they cannot do so if the effect is the harm to the common good.

Thus governors, Ministers, Mayors, Police Chiefs were wrong to obey their national leaders who ordered their nations shut down or quarantined. They should have demanded the statistical proof sufficient to warrant it. And without that they should have refused to obey, if not arrested the national leaders for attempting a coup d’etat upon the free people of their own nation.

They should not have listened to the hype on TV or social media.  The hype should have been outlawed from the start. Only verified statistical evidence should be referred to.

Here, I do not call the Hype, the comments of individuals, but the concerted effort to present the Coronavirus as an existential threat. This hype was directed by the World Health Organization and consisted chiefly in stating that 3.4% mortality rate will apply to the whole human race, even though it only referred to the deaths of those who were admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with extreme symptoms of some sort of influenza.

These subordinate officers of civil government also should not have ignored the evidence that the head of the WHO is a former terrorist.

Unquestioning obedience in large masses of human beings is like the instinct cattle have to follow the rush in a stampede. What they are running from may be unknown to nearly all of them except the ones who started the stampede, but stampede they do, even if it means they all run off a cliff and are killed.

We should take a lesson from Nature on this. Nature is the name for the natural world. It is not a goddess, but it is a book from which we can learn many valuable lessons about sanity and humanity.

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