MICHAEL WALSH: Clergy Who Bowed to COVID Fears Need to Face a Reckoning.

Like the doctors and nurses who suddenly discovered and complained that their work was dangerous—as if medicine were to be practiced simply as “wellness” and not when the Grim Reaper comes calling on the fields of battle or in the charnel houses of an epidemic—the clergy has all but admitted that what they do, or what they pretended to do, was a frivolity only to be practiced at the sufferance of the local commissars.

In 1844, when anti-Catholic nativists threatened to burn down Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Bishop John J. Hughes gathered his parishioners, some of them armed, and promised the Protestant mob that any assault on the church would be met with deadly force. If a single Catholic church was burned, “Dagger John” announced to the city, the despised immigrant Irish would burn New York to the ground. Not a church was touched.

Yeah, well, that kind of muscular Christianity has gone out of style.