The Branch Covidian Crackdown on the Churches

We must resist Big Brother assaults on the church:

Tyrants always target churches. These thugs know full well that churches are a competing source of authority. If people give their allegiance to God, and not the State, they are always going to be much harder to control. So dictators have always warred against religion.

The communists shut down churches, and the Nazis did the same, along with synagogues of course. Today the persecuted church is an underground church in places like North Korea and Communist China. That is the way it goes: tyranny stands opposed to religious faith. In their minds, there can be only one lord, not two.

The statist attack on churches in the West has of course ramped up significantly over the past two years, and the only thing worse than that has been how happy most churches have been to go right along with it. Whether they readily complied with letting the state shut them down for months on end, or eagerly allowed unjust discrimination to take place in the form of excluding the unjabbed, they were far too willing to do the bidding of secular governments.

I have been documenting this on a regular basis over this period. And there seems to be no end in sight. And something that occurred in Perth just recently is a shocking example of this. In the middle of a Catholic mass a policeman waltzed right in and started demanding papers. It might as well have been a scene out of 1930s Germany. Here is how one news outlet tells the story:

Parishioners have been left troubled after a police officer stopped a Catholic mass at a Perth church on Thursday night to make sure that everyone was wearing masks. Police interrupted the evening service at St Bernadette’s Catholic Church in Mount Hawthorn after reportedly receiving tips about improper mask behaviour.

 

Mask wearing is currently required in indoor settings in the Perth, Peel, South West, Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions, but exemptions apply. Five parishioners were not masked up. One had an exemption, and the other four donned face-coverings.

 

A photograph taken of the incident shows a uniformed officer walking down the aisle checking people’s details. “During a Catholic Mass in Perth tonight a policeman allowed himself in, strutting up the aisle demanding correct mask behaviour and checking exemptions,” the caption on the photograph, posted by Perth local Patrick Horneman reads.

 

“When have we seen this behaviour before in history?” The church confirmed that the incident had taken place. Speaking on radio 6PR, parishioner Matthew said that the incident showed a “lack of trust.” “People are pretty taken aback by this. It’s pretty confronting and it’s pretty troubling really to see the liturgy that you love being stopped by police,” he said. https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/coronavirus/outrage-after-police-stop-mt-hawthorn-st-bernadettes-church-service-to-check-masks-c-5565472

Plenty of comments appeared under the story. Here is just one of them: “I am not a religious person at all but this is shameful. The gent on the radio that was at the service also said that every single person not wearing a mask had an exemption. I can’t believe that we are stooping to this, shame on everyone who is defending this action, shame on the police who thought this was okay. This is overstepping the mark Mark.”

Advance Australia said this about the incident:

We’re in disbelief. More than once during this pandemic, tyrannical Australian Premiers have used their police forces to infringe on the rights and freedoms of Aussies, and here at ADVANCE, we hoped we had seen the worst of it. But we’ve hit another level.

 

In Mark MaoGowan’s People’s Republic of Western Australia, police are now stopping religious services to enforce his arbitrary COVID-19 restrictions on free Australians. About 6pm last night, a WA policeman let himself into a Mass at St Bernadette Catholic Church in Glendalough, marched himself up to the front, stopped the service, interrupted the priest and addressed the entire congregation midway through their homily.

 

You read that right. Police in WA are now violating our churches and our sacred liturgies. This is an outrage. This is about as un-Australian as it gets. https://www.advanceaustralia.org.au/police_in_wa_stop_church_service_over_stupid_covid_rules

It sure is. And if any clown says that the police were just following orders, he should sit down and shut up and start reading some history. The Nuremberg Trials put an end to that sort of lousy excuse – or at least I thought they had. Once again we are not learning the lessons of history.

Thankfully the Catholic church and the political opposition have not taken too kindly to this outrageous action. As today’s Weekend Australian reports:

The WA Catholic Archdiocese condemned the actions. “The Catholic Archdiocese of Perth does not support or condone the disruption of the Celebration of the Eucharist for any reason, and condemns in the strongest possible terms this impingement upon the free practice of the Catholic faith,” the church said. “With respect to this incident, it is unfortunate these checks were not undertaken prior to the Mass or at its conclusion.” Opposition health spokeswoman Libby Mettam said the state could do “a lot better”. “The McGowan government needs to explain how this type of state action is at all proportionate or necessary,” she said.

It is NOT appropriate or necessary. And times like this call for strong resistance. Some of you would recall a similar incident in a Canadian church on Easter Sunday last year when a bunch of cops sought to shut down the service. The brave Polish pastor Artur Pawlowski basically threw the invading police out. I wrote about it at the time: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/04/08/signs-of-hope-scenes-from-the-resistance/

I quoted the pastor in my article:

This is unacceptable. Even during the times of the Middle Ages, the knights were commanded to leave their swords outside the church; they were not allowed to enter the church. But these days, nothing is holy for those people. They just walk in like it’s a restaurant. I grew up in Poland under the boot of the Soviets, behind the Iron Curtain. What I see right now, I see everything escalating and moving to the new level. They’re acting just like the Communists were acting when I was growing up when the pastors and the priests were arrested, and some were murdered. Many were tortured. That’s why I say what I say, because I see a repetition of history.

See this video of him as he boldly stands against this anti-Christian tyranny and bullying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXefE-Z3H6M

And Mark Steyn also commented on this and related cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC1o4__XZM4

Resistance to tyranny is always a duty of ours. And when the State seeks to displace God and shut down places of worship, all believers should be just like the courageous Artur Pawlowski. Indeed, they should be just like the fearless Daniel when he also refused to submit to unjust authority.

He kept on praying to the one true God when he was told to cease and desist. I discuss that story and many others from the Bible here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/03/24/12-biblical-cases-of-civil-disobedience/

Now is the time for Christians to rise up and stand as brave Daniel did, saying no to the heavy-handed state as it seeks to assert its delegated authority over the authority of God Almighty. Enough is enough. It really is time to wake up before we lose it all.

And no matter how many times you have heard this, we need to keep repeating it. The German pastor and Holocaust survivor Martin Niemoller put it this way:

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

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