A Sign Of The Times
Our Churches our currently closed due to the Corona Virus Pandemic. One such church cordoned off the pews with police caution tape. It looked like a crime scene.
Let's start by looking at scripture:
Numbers 12
Miriam and Aaron Oppose Moses
1 Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. 2 “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” they asked. “Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” And the Lord heard this.
3 (Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.)
4 At once the Lord said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, “Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.” So the three of them went out. 5 Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud; he stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When the two of them stepped forward, 6 he said, “Listen to my words:
“When there is a prophet among you,
I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions,
I speak to them in dreams.
7 But this is not true of my servant Moses;
he is faithful in all my house.
8 With him I speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the Lord.
Why then were you not afraid
to speak against my servant Moses?”
9 The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them.
10 When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous[a]—it became as white as snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had a defiling skin disease, 11 and he said to Moses, “Please, my lord, I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. 12 Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away.”
13 So Moses cried out to the Lord, “Please, God, heal her!”
14 The Lord replied to Moses, “If her father had spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days? Confine her outside the camp for seven days; after that she can be brought back.” 15 So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on till she was brought back.
16 After that, the people left Hazeroth and encamped in the Desert of Paran.
Here are my musings about how I think Numbers 12 is relevant to the current crisis today.
Miriam and Aaron committed a sin by disrespecting their brother, Moses. This angered God whereby he punished her by inflicting her with a disease. Is the Corona virus a punishment from God? Bishop Athanasius Schneider seems to think so. He proposes that the Corona virus is a result of us disrespecting God. He mentions the Pachamama worship at the Vatican and Communion in the hand as examples. Now in Aaron's case he repented and asked Moses to forgive them. Moses then asked God to heal his sister. God did so, but first required her to be quarantined for 7 days. We are currently under quarantine for our afflictions. This quarantine includes not having access to the Church and It's sacraments.
This is serious and requires that we return to giving God our full respect due to Him.
From Bishop Schneider's interview about the Corona virus:
For more than fifty years, he observed, the Eucharistic presence of Jesus Christ has been “trivialized” and even “desecrated” through the practice of Communion in the hand and the introduction of “protestantizing elements” in the Roman liturgy. “Now,” he said, “the Lord has intervened and deprived almost all the faithful of assisting at Holy Mass and sacramentally receiving Holy Communion. The innocent and the guilty are enduring this tribulation together, since in the mystery of the Church all are mutually united as members.”
To make restitution to God, he said the Pope and bishops ought urgently to carry out a public act of reparation in Rome “for sins against the Holy Eucharist” once the coronavirus pandemic is brought under control. He also said the Pope should issue concrete norms inviting the entire Church to “turn toward the Lord” in the liturgy and “forbid the practice of Communion in the hand.”
“The Church,” he said, “cannot continue unpunished to treat the Holy of Holies in the little sacred Host in such a minimalistic and unsafe manner.”
