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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This is an absolulute diabolical agenda by the world elites. Today, Dr. Deborah Birx, who heads the United States Federal Task Force on Coronavirus with Vice President Mike Pence and others, has said, live on camera, that according to her data, 99% of the total mortality rate in all of Europe are people “OVER 50 and with pre-existing conditions”. So, the less than 1% of deaths which have no pre-existing conditions and are outside of the age range of vulnerability, tells us, this hyper-tyrannical shutting down of masses and governments worldwide is absolute insanity.
absolute**
Thank you for being a voice of sanity, of reason and logic. I see glimmers of reason beginning to return to humanity.
We need about five more of you, though. 🙂
I agree with your assessment, Br Bugnolo.
“I was only following orders” was not accepted as a defence against crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, and somehow I don’t think it will be accepted at our own particular judgements either.
But this unquestioning obedience has a long history in the Catholic Church. I am no expert or historian, but remember reading the Rule of St Benedict, written 516AD, chapters 5 and 71 on obedience, which seem to me – perhaps due to translation limitations trying to be charitable – to encourage blind, unquestioning obedience.
The Rule of St Benedict can be downloaded or browsed in English in a variety of formats here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50040
Your comments on this could be very helpful.
In religious orders, we take a vow of evangelical obedience, and we obey our superiors as a sacrifice pleasing to God. But our vow presupposes that our superior is consecrated to God and proven to be such. Thus here we do not have a government of men, and Benedict and all the other holy founders, who had been transformed by the Holy Spirit into perfect instruments of His Will laid down clearly that superiors had to also be observers of their Rule. For this reason, since their Rules were inspired by God, it is not a question of blind obedience, but obedience in the light of faith. And no Saint expected or asked or directed in his Rule that you obey your superior in sin. The vow is to uproot your loyalty to your own passions and whims, not your loyalty to Christ and the Gospel. Since the great Founders were men of God, to say they willed the kind of blind obedience which would transgress faith and morals and God, is simply false, if not blasphemy.
In fact, as the manuals on obedience which were written throughout the ages explain, the obedience of a religious to his superior is always limited by the concept of ACCORDING TO THE RULE. The Rule written by the Saint establishes a limit. So, for example, if your superior thinks he is the president of the country and orders you as such, you simply ignore his directives because he is no longer orderings you ACCORDING TO THE RULE and you report him to the Apostolic See or local bishop or local police, to be take away as either mad or a usurper, and in that non obedience you observe your vow and keep the Rule with holy perfection, having defended the monastery from an antichrist.
For this reason, the Rules written by Saints are the best guarantee for holy obedience, even if a community fall into criminality by teaching another kind of obedience. The false notion of obedience was spread by Jesuits in the 16th century, and my former superior was always reading their books.
Agree 100%. We must be in full revolution against the powers of darkness (Socialists, Democrats) that wish to control us. They are about to destroy the world economy by exploiting a passing disease to suffocate resistance to their devilish plans.
All freedom loving people must rebel now and call for new leaders. We must have world wide mass resistance to this nonsense. Yes, there will be casualties but such is the price of freedom.