Ambrose was governing Milan in AD 374, when the bishop of that city died and a struggle broke out between the Arian and Nicene factions to secure the succession. At stake was the catholicity of the church there, through its confession of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father. The deceased bishop, Auxentius, had been of Arian persuasion.
While doing his best to maintain civic order, Ambrose, though still a catechumen, suddenly found himself elected bishop by popular demand. To take up that new responsibility he had to be baptized, confirmed, ordained, and consecrated over the course of just a few days. He then took charge of the battle for orthodoxy in that region and for the libertas ecclesiae, which was threatened by imperial interference.
One skirmish in this struggle saw the young emperor, Valentinian II—urged on by his mother, Justina, the power behind the throne and herself an Arian—attempt to take possession of some of Milan’s churches and to install another Arian bishop. Ambrose moved quickly to prevent bloodshed as the faithful (who were rather feistier than their counterparts today) occupied the contested buildings so that this plan could not be carried out. Besieged in a basilica by imperial forces, he began composing hymns for his flock to sing through the night watches, so as to remain alert. The imperial plan was indeed thwarted and the Catholic faith prevailed. (You can learn a bit more of the story here, I see, though it is differently deployed.)
One can hardly imagine such a thing happening today, however, either in Milano or in Montréal. First of all, there are barely enough Catholics left in such places to occupy a basilica. Second, many of them, though they recite the creed often enough, have only a weak grasp of what “consubstantiality” means and why it matters. More than a few of their fellows, perhaps even their catechist or priest, are for all practical purposes closet Arians. Third, when they say what Christians have always said, “Jesus is Lord”—do they still say it?—they don’t mean that he is Lord in any sense that could or would call Caesar’s authority into question. And when they say with Jesus himself, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” it never crosses their minds that Caesar might claim for himself what belongs to God. Even when Caesar says, “Churches are closed,” or “Churches are open only to those to whom I say they are open,” the response is not resistance but blind obedience.
Those who respond thus—including our own Québec bishops—are not of Ambrose’s breed. They seem to think that only things unseen belong to God. What can be seen belongs to Caesar and is at his disposal, including church buildings and those who worship in them. Perhaps they have forgotten even the first article of the creed, wherein no such distinction is permitted between the visible and the invisible. Or perhaps they were catechized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who taught that the invisible soul may belong to God, if there is a God, but the visible—the body and the whole sphere of social interaction, including religion—belongs to the State. At all events, that Jesus Christ rules over both soul and body seems not to have registered. The notion that churches are his embassies, not subject to secular jurisdiction, appears to have been abandoned. Perhaps that’s why governments (or so it is rumored) are now preparing to tax churches.
It was, of course, a trick question about taxation that elicited Jesus’ famous saying about rendering to Caesar and rendering to God. It was a trick question because there was no right answer to it. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” That is, is it permissible under divine law to pay taxes to a foreign tyrant who has seized the vineyard of God by force? If Jesus said “Yes,” he acknowledged that Caesar had a right to rule over the land and people of God; that the vineyard actually belonged to Caesar. And if he said “No,” he acknowledged the cause of the revolutionaries who were trying to retake that vineyard by contrary force. (Their cause would later meet with a flicker of success, but in AD 70 they were crushed by the Romans, as Jesus prophesied they would be.) So one way he was a heretic, the other a rebel. One way he could be censured by religious authorities, the other by State authorities. Either way he was done, politically speaking.
Well, he was indeed “done,” but his hour had not yet come. He was not quite ready to cry out, “It is finished.” He would be obedient to God even unto death, being censured in the end by both religious and secular authorities, who conspired together to hang him on a cross. From this greatest of evils God would bring forth his greatest good, redeeming his people not merely from Roman oppression but from the devil who through fear of death holds all men in bondage, and from the guilt of their sins, which they heaped on Jesus’ shoulders. Meanwhile, Jesus escaped the horns of the political dilemma on which they sought to impale him, by calling for a coin with which the tax could be paid. When they produced it, he enquired of them, “Whose likeness and inscription does it bear?” And the answer came, “Caesar’s.” “Then,” said he, “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
In other words: If for convenience you use Caesar’s coinage (note that Jesus carried none) then pay Caesar’s tax. For if you use his coinage, you already acknowledge his lordship. You may do so, for he has at the moment, by divine permission, a kind of lordship, through which he does good as well as evil. He builds road, for example, on which you conduct commerce. He provides security against other predators, and a semblance of law and order. But you must render to Caesar only what actually is Caesar’s, being sure to render to God what is God’s. It is in God’s image and likeness that you have been made, so be careful not to be made over into the likeness of Caesar, whose coinage you use. The real dilemma here is yours. You must learn how and where to draw the line between God and Caesar.
St Peter knew where to draw the line. Where obedience to man prevents obedience to God, man must be disobeyed. St Ambrose knew where to draw the line. That is why he barricaded himself in the house of God, with his flock, and refused to allow the heretical emissary to enter, though that emissary came in Caesar’s name. St François de Laval, Québec’s first bishop, likewise knew. He spent half his life doing battle on both sides of the Atlantic with Governor Frontenac and that network of secular powers that under Rigaud and Bigot (who produced a kind of prototype Global Public-Private Partnership) would eventually become the criminal kleptocracy that squeezed the life out of New France.
Such bishops, alas, are nowhere to be found today, at least not around here. The only line our mitred brethren know how to draw with their shepherd’s crook is a line in the snow dividing their own flocks, as the government requires. Neither, of course, do most who belong to those flocks know how to draw it. They rush to occupy the churches only because they are warm and comfortable. Who cares about the brethren shivering outside? They should get vaccinated. Then they, too, could be warm and comfortable. Never mind the fact that the double-vaxxed are twice as likely to be infected with the latest variant as the unvaxxed, and the triple-vaxxed four times as likely. Just do what the government says, like good Catholics. My god, you benighted anti-vaxxers are annoying! Just get vaccinated, and all our problems will disappear.
I hear such things from English as well as French bishops, priests, and laity, including theologians, in various places. They all talk about loving the neighbor; only they don’t, really. They don’t even care to discover the basic facts with which they might work to help the neighbor. What they care about is remaining as comfortable as possible, about fitting in. They are very good at fitting in. I fear we are all very good at fitting in. We pay our enormous taxes and are rewarded with a semi-functional universal healthcare system—by dint of disastrous government policies and cowardly physicians now increasingly dysfunctional, unfortunately. Then we are told that, for the sake of maintaining that system, we must take experimental medications that render our immune systems similarly dysfunctional; that those who refuse to do this will be barred from the public sphere, perhaps from the hospitals in due course, and even now from their own churches. And to this absurdity, this outrage, we respond, “Yes sir; whatever you say, sir!”
In no small part, it is by means of our universal healthcare system that we have been led down the path of cradle-to-grave dependence on Caesar and of compromise with the culture of death. And now it is an almighty fear of death that has suddenly seized us, a fear constantly stoked by self-fulfilling threats of “overwhelmed” hospitals (that is, hospitals where beds are empty because the people who tend them aren’t coming into work any more). Fear of death, in this case a quite irrational fear, is being used against us, to manipulate us toward a level of compliance in self-harm never before witnessed. Freedoms we once swore by are being traded away like so many useless baubles. A papered society—or rather, a QR-coded society—that governments and globalists knew we would not easily accept is now being forced upon us in the name of a faux emergency. Forced even, and indeed especially, at the doors of our houses of worship.
And what are we doing about it? When Caesar says to us, even of the house of God, “You may go there” or “You may not go there”—or worse, “This one may go there, but not that one”—rather than barricading ourselves inside that house and singing the praises of God and his Christ, we barricade the house itself against all of whom Caesar disapproves. Only when Caesar does approve, and only to those of whom he approves, do our bishops and priests say, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.”
The proper response to that call, as you know, is Dignum et iustum est—whoops, we’re not allowed Latin these days, Ambrose, so here’s the English—”It is right and just.” And it is indeed right and just, our duty and our salvation! But right and just according to whom? God, or Caesar? That is the dilemma on which our bishops are currently impaled.
It is a dilemma they try to evade by pretending that we fight, not against flesh and blood, and not against principalities and powers in the heavenlies either. No, we fight against a pandemic only! They blame the whole business on the virus, in other words, as if we’d never seen one before or will never see the like of this one again. Thus do they justify what cannot be justified, what Cardinal Müller has quite correctly called the grave sin of barring from their churches, in the name of Covid and Omicron, in the name of Public Health, members of the faithful in good standing canonically. They bar even those who are not sick and unlikely to get sick or to spread sickness. They bar the conscientious, who will not display Caesar’s mark in order to enter God’s house. They receive only those Caesar is content to send them. They even deputize the laity to prevent the rest of their brethren from approaching the altar of God before they have sacrificed to Caesar. They are the traditores who play Caesar’s game, the game they cannot hope to win, the game they have already lost just because they play. They deliver over the numbers, if not the names, of all who enter their basilicas and churches.
That is very strong language, yes, perhaps a bit too strong. But they are doing what is not right, what is not just, what is treacherous if not yet traitorous. And they seem—this is the best defense that can be mounted for them—not to grasp what is at stake. They don’t know why this game is afoot or what the prize is. Ambrose, who pointed out that even a faithful emperor was merely a son of the Church, not a ruler over her, could tell them a thing or two about dealing with Caesar. He could explain to them what is at stake. But they know neither Ambrose nor the ways of Ambrose. They lack his conviction and his courage, just as they lack his understanding. Thus do they render to Caesar what is God’s, delivering not only their buildings but their own brethren into his hands.
What will they do, we may wonder, when those who are now being denied the bread of heaven are also being denied the bread of earth, as is beginning to happen in Austria and elsewhere. To judge by the Austrian bishops, and by their own record to date, the answer is—nothing. But “nothing” will not do as an answer. The people of God need bishops who are faithful to God, bishops capable of putting Caesar in his place, bishops who will go to the barricades with the people, not against them. If, to enjoy such bishops, they have to go out and find godly catechumens whom they can (Peter permitting) make bishops, so be it.
(Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared in slightly different form at “Desiring a Better Country”, the author’s Substack site.)
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Not at all too strong. Fortunately, here in the People’s Republic of New York, no such restrictions yet apply, or at least not at the Chrysostom et Tridentine rites I attend. And during the ’20 shutdown, not a few faithful priests fed the faithful in private homes, Deo Gracias.
You can be certain that if what we read in this piece were to be delivered as a homily by a priest or deacon in most dioceses of the US, that cleric would be summarily chastised and dismissed by his bishop. Such is the state of the Catholic Church in America.
Satan is clearly the force behind our rogue government and those hierarchs who conspire with it to do evil.
Deacon Ed,
What you say is true. Sadly so.
Excellent. All parish priests should read this.
I always thought that everything belonged to God. Also, Jesus put the Jews on the defensive, because they carried coins with Ceasar’s image, that is, the image of a god. Certainly, that violated the First Commandment.
I assume that, in Quebec, politicians who support legalized abortion and homosexual marriage are never denied access to the Sacraments. Yet, the unvaccinated are barred from even stepping foot into a Church. The contrast says something about the hierarchy of the Church there and elsewhere.
Brilliant and incisive essay. Thank you.
For a good number of American Catholics, their Caesar is the delusional voted-out Donald!
Your opinion.
FYI: Donald Trump while not Catholic is more Catholic than Let’s Go Brandon
Well, since you herald your objection that “some Catholics” pay homage to Donald Czar, readers here can assume you are personally opposed to being forced to perform abortions yourself, but join Joseph Biden in ensuring that doctors and nurses objecting to abortion homicides are forced to assist at abortions, under threat of loss of their vocations in medicine, because you are “enlightened”?
Is that correct that you join Joseph Czar?
Anticipation of the gist of De Farrow’s article became apparent when reading, “Never mind the fact that the double-vaxxed are twice as likely to be infected with the latest variant as the unvaxxed, and the triple-vaxxed four times as likely. Just do what the government says, like good Catholics. My god!” (Farrow). Where Dr Farrow do you find this evidence? What are your sources? Why are so many gullible? There too much at stake here to avoid my questions.
Let’s review this claim. “You may not have heard of Blachier, but in France TV viewers are as familiar with his face as we are here with Dr. Fauci’s. And he caused the COVID pot to boil over a couple of days ago when he supposedly claimed that data from Denmark show that people who are triple vaccinated are more likely to be infected with the Omicron variant than the unvaccinated. Let’s take a look. As far as his remarks about the Danish data go, he is said to have implied that triple-vaccinated people are more likely to be infected with Omicron than the unvaccinated. He has clarified his remarks and says what he meant is that if you are triple vaccinated and still get infected, then there is a greater chance that the infection will be due to Omicron than Delta. If you are unvaccinated, then the Delta variant is more likely to be the cause of an infection. He correctly states that this does not mean you are more likely to be infected if you are triple vaccinated” (McGill, Office for Science and Society
Separating Sense from Nonsense). Isn’t McGill where Dr Farrow teaches ethics?
A viewpoint on Dr Farrow’s opposition to the mandates with which I agree. Lockdowns, sanctions against unvaxxed, school closures et al have likely caused more distress and damaged lives than the effect of the virus. However, Dr Farrow injures his excellent theological, ethics reputation, that I’ve praised in the past, by adding conspiracy theories [although there’s indication of political manipulation] and careless mistakes in judgment regarding facts on vaccine efficacy. It compromises the strength of his ethical discussion on mandates, particularly as they are applied, for priests preventing us with quarantines from conferring the sacraments on the sick and dying, which Dr Farrow has admirably argued against.
We do well to not apply hot-button labels to another’s speech when we do not have competence to fully understand many issues.
It does appear to be fact that a greater number of vaccinated individuals have tested positive for omicron. Why? To begin, the number of vaccinated individuals is greater. Further, does it seem reasonable to assume that the vaccinated population is more worried, anxious, or fearful of infection than the unvaxxed? Common sense suggests that they are. They likely present for testing in greater numbers than the unvaxxed.
I can only speak anecdotally about my neighborhood–professionals who frequently travel internationally for business and pleasure. They have sought testing for themselves and their children for the common sniffle. At the same time, omicron infection has been characterized as typically not more severe than the common cold (among the vaccinated). It seems reasonable, therefore, that a greater number of cases are reported among the vaccinated. The absolute number, the case number, the incidence, the event of infection, and the rate of infection therefore would be higher among the vaccinated.
The absolute risk and the relative risk are other measures which enable a more comprehensive picture of sequelae among the vaxxed/unvaxxed groups. My county notably does not report absolute risk. It does not report that a higher number of vaccinated individuals present for testing and does not gather data on severity of symptoms. Yet these and other ‘spurious’ factors do influence the FEAR factor of us all. More information and more reasoned discussion of the information, with more charity among us all could cast out fear. Of whom are we afraid?
What’s at issue is the contention, not the “appearance of a fact”, that triple vaxxed are 4 to 5X more susceptible to Omicron than unvaxxed. What I rely on are studies made by reliable sources. Did you read the above report by McGill on Dr Blachier’s correction, where Dr Farrow lectures? There are further studies that repudiate the preposterous claim,
“A Reuters report from Dec.11 shares the finding of an Israeli study which asserts that ‘a three-shot course of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine provided significant protection against the new Omicron variant.’ VERDICT
Misleading. Some social media users are misinterpreting ONS data about Omicron’s ability to break through in vaccinated individuals. New data shows breakthrough cases among vaccinated people are more likely to be Omicron than other variants, not that vaccines don’t work or that vaccinated people are at greater risk of infection than the unvaccinated” (Reuters Fact Checking).
For further consideration that statistics is not simply reading of numbers, rather what the data presents:
“The patients that have been vaccinated so far have no complication, Angelique Coetzee, the national chair of the South African Medical Association, told CNN. Other doctors in South Africa have also said that vaccinated patients with the Omicron variant are having only mild to moderate symptoms, CNN reported. Among those who are hospitalized, about 90% are unvaccinated” (WebMD).
“Analysis of individuals with breakthrough cases after receiving a third booster dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine found that 9.9 percent [85] of the 862 omicron patients met this criteria [the CDC definition of vaccine breakthrough cases]” (Becker’s Hospital Review).
If you visit the original posting at https://douglasfarrow.substack.com/ and examine the brief comment section there, you will find a couple of leads that I provided. (Please note that one can’t have it both ways as to who is occupying hospital beds and in what numbers.) What you will not find is what I think about the McGill propaganda site you reference; nor could you be expected to have much idea what is happening at McGill. Even most people who are there do not, though in “The Mask and the Face” (which you can find in the same place) I try to enlighten them a little.
Thanks Dr Farrow I’ll check it.
Your reasoning in The Mask and the Face is good. Masks are an imposition that haven’t been proved effective. I too had issues with the Vaxx and hesitated, although as a priest in the US I wouldn’t be able to visit medical care facilities and likely assist at the local parish.
I realize that this is a new virus and much remains to be determined. Mistakes are expected in treatment, the virus is proven dangerous, however the mandates as said are disproportionately, in my view destructive.
Indeed they are, as mountains of studies have demonstrated. But one more thing while I’m at it: Isaiah says, “Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread.” Amen. But also, do not call a conspiracy theory everything that they call a conspiracy theory, for one after another has proven to be factual. You are taught to fear, nay, to dread covid, to distract you from what you should fear, viz., the end of your democracy. This time I will send you to “The Emerging Nowa Huta” and “Enrolled in the Religion of Fear” (https://douglasfarrow.academia.edu/research#featured), but also to Michael Rectenwald’s fine essay, “What is the Great Reset?” (https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/great-reset-essays-interviews).
I fear that most Bishops have already made their position clear. They have sided with the state, and possibly with their own fears of mortality. During the early days of covid, “visitors”, including priests, were barred from hospitals, even to give the last rights, so hysterical were those in service to the secular. On the other hand, a priest revealed to me that since he was well known by staff at the local hospital, he was admitted. However, other fellow priests had made it clear they would not be willing go there to serve the dying. It would be interesting to know how the Lord will ask them to account for that behavior one day. I personally have had enough of the hysteria regarding this disease.I still am appalled that the Bishops agreed to shut the churches in 2020 and equally so that the Pope suggested this was a good idea.In places like Australia, church attendance is constrained to absurdly low levels. All in the name of what is good for the “group” of course. Just like all with a leftist / Communist bent believe. Social justice trumps God for this group. Very sad. We have yet to get back to pre-covid standards, with singing still prohibited, an issue not pressed by the Bishops due to their own fear level no doubt. I believe I have the right to take whatever risk I deem proper for my own life. I also dont believe I am responsible for anyone else’s decisions or state of health. Its time the Bishops did some hard thinking about what their response will be the next time the state comes calling. Formerly free Australia has already turned into a COVID GULAG. At the very least, Bishops need to insist we are entitled to have our choirs back. Anyone too frightened to be exposed to singing, please do the rest of us a favor and stay home.
Thank you Dr Farrow, you are speaking for so many of us and your words are not too strong. Thank you also Mr Olson for being such a superb editor and commissioning articles of such interest and importance. I had hoped the New Year would see in some reasoning, but all the indications so far is that secular and religious leaders are as inept as ever.
Added to my comment is the date of publication of the McGill University Office for Science and Society report on the claims regarding susceptibility to Covid and variants for those Vaxxed, (Joe Schwarcz PhD 17 Dec 2021).
If Dr. Farrow’s language is strong, he is in good company:
Pope Leo asserts that the civil authorities have no authority whatsoever when they perpetrate injustice, i.e., when they demand of us that which is “openly repugnant to the natural or the divine law.” And, of course, Leo reminds us that “We ought to obey God rather than men,” which is to say that we are obliged to engage in civil disobedience if it comes to that. That is strong language.
Before exhortation that launches a movement to engage in entirely justified civil disobedience begins, those doing the exhorting had better have a grasp of the big picture. Consider the words of St. Irenaeus:
It seems that while civil authorities will ultimately be punished by God for “whatsoever they do to the subversion of justice, iniquitously, and impiously, and illegally, and tyrannically,” at the same time their tyranny may have been allowed, in God’s perfect Providence, “for the purposes of fear and punishment and rebuke,” as the people “deserve it.” If the growing tyranny of government is something we have brought on ourselves, we had better make repentance of the sin that drew down God’s punishment upon us an essential part of the movement to resist the tyranny, if we want our resistance to be blessed by God with success.
And what might our collective sin be? Well, all through the Old Testament we find that God would hand His people over to tyranny imposed upon them by the nation whose false god they had worshiped. Idolatry is what brings this kind of punishment down upon God’s people. Have we been rendering unto Caesar authority over innocent human life that belongs only to God? A few decades after the Nuremberg Trials (the prosecutors of which treated “legal” abortion as a crime against humanity) had established that the state has no authority whatsoever to legalize the murder innocent humanity, the contemporary, atheistic state began pretending to have the authority to legalize the murder of the child in the womb. Worldwide, billions of children have been “legally” murdered since then. Do you suppose God has noticed this?
Christ couldn’t have made it clearer, in His description of the Last Judgment recorded in Matthew 25, that those who must depart from Him into eternal fire will be damned not so much for what they did — after all, Christ had paid our debt for those sins — but for what they failed to do for Him in the least of His brethren. Do you suppose our neglecting to use our political freedom, which we only possessed through God’s kind Providence, to end the unprecedented mass murder of His children, is bringing tyranny down upon us, also according to God’s Providence? Are we being handed over to oppression by those to whom we rendered authority which belongs only to God?
Any movement to resist this tyranny will fail if it isn’t essentially a repentance of the idolatry inherent in rendering unto Caesar god-like authority. And we won’t be imposing a theocracy upon humanity. On the contrary, we will simply be restoring the enforcement of rule #1 of civilized society: that the powerful can’t kill the less powerful simply because doing so serves their purposes.
If our resistance springs from genuine repentance the currently reigning Atheocracy will be brought down.
It’s easier for a coward to kill his friends than his enemies. Most Church leaders in Canada would rather kill Christ again than to stand up to the awesome power of the state and the establishment media. What does Christ do to them except love them? He doesn’t fight back. But the government and the media – now they are to be feared. At least in this life.