In B.C. we’ve had our churches shuttered by government edict, but somehow it’s not the same as seeing what’s happening in Quebec, where the government has barred anyone who hasn’t been vaccinated from entering a house of worship.

We reported on it last month, but what drove it home for me this week was the photo of Montreal Catholics kneeling in the snow outside Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.

Think about that and let it sink home. If someone had told you two years ago you couldn’t enter a church without a government vaccine passport, would you have believed it?

In B.C. and across the country we’re now seeing government-imposed division of the faithful with the imposition of vaccine restrictions to worship. The decline in church attendance observed over the holidays may be just the start of what’s to come.

How quickly we’ve acquiesced to restrictions on our freedoms over the past two years. The numbers show most people are willing to accept all the government decrees to date. But who’s to say they’re over? 

The harshest restrictions are being imposed now just when many are expressing hope that the pandemic may be winding down with the arrival of the comparatively innocuous Omicron variant. If it eventually infects everyone and the vast majority of people hardly know they have it, it’s arguably a better outcome than many more years of increasing authoritarianism by governments that have been all too willing to mandate rather than soberly consider the destructive harm of all-too-often arbitrary measures.

Yet Canada’s federal and provincial governments are showing no indication of easing off their zeal for control despite the promising developments and despite the devastation the lockdowns and other restrictions have caused to the lives of Canadians.

So I encourage you to ask yourself this question: even if you’ve been able to accept all the edicts so far, is there a line in the sand that you won’t allow to be crossed?

Everyone has a different threshold for tolerating the otherwise intolerable. When it comes to government response to the pandemic, the limit for many people was reached early on with restrictions on businesses, schools, and churches that went unchallenged by media and Opposition parties.  For others, the breaking point came with the imposition of mandated vaccinations in order to participate in normal society.

If the government still hasn’t crossed your boundary for unacceptable behaviour, ask yourself what it will take. Is there anything that’s out of bounds, as long as it’s for “public safety,” as determined by government and media?

In a recent National Post column Father Raymond de Souza said the Quebec government, in tightening its pandemic protocols, “has crossed a critical line in relation to religious liberty.”

With its new decree, “the Quebec government is moving into new territory. No longer is it regulating how many people can come to church, as all provinces have throughout the pandemic, or how they are to be arranged (physical distancing and the like), but who can enter the house of God at all.”

As Pembroke Bishop Guy Desrochers wrote in a letter, we must “seriously wonder whether the line between what the State can and cannot dictate to the various religious communities has been crossed.” 

When you look at those people kneeling in the snow outside their church, the answer should be obvious. 

Twitter @paulschratz
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