No COVID Amnesty Without Public Repentance

Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University and recently made headlines for her article in the Atlantic calling for a “Pandemic amnesty”.

We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.

 

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID. We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

 

Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

The COVIDIAN Party Line seems to have become, “Time to move on. Well-meaning people made mistakes with the best of intentions. We were afraid, and in the dark about the truth of the disease. We hysterics did the best we could. Now we must forgive, forget, and move forward”.

The answer from all of us on Team Reality is a resounding, “NO!”

As Orthodox Christians, we will forgive those who were wrong. We will love them, and we will pray for them. But amnesty for their past actions without active repentance? Absolutely not.

Particularly for those who caused so much trauma within the Church herself, there is no amnesty without a public recognition of COVID sins and repentance from them. Without that, we have no confidence that everything won’t just happen again – based on the same false excuses made before. In some states, the power to repeat the worst COVID policies has even been codified into state law. Next “public health emergency”, whatever that may be (a virus, climate change, food shortages, gun violence, racism…), we could easily find ourselves once again locked down, masked up, and/or mandated into doing God knows what. We could also easily find many of our clergy, and fellow Orthodox Christians, enthusiastically going along with it all just like last time.

priest wearing mask

We need accountability. We need public apologies. We need the worst COVIDIANs removed from office – political office and church office. We need to hear the right people say, “We were wrong, never again!” Only then will even a modicum of trust be restored in the system. 

From an Orthodox perspective, we need to remember how much harm COVIDIAN hierarchs, clergy, and laity really caused. Many Orthodox parishes shut down for an extended period of time. Some parishes lost as much as 40% or more of their membership as a result. Among the parishes that stayed open or re-opened during the height of the Pandemic, many reduced attendance, required masks even on toddlers, forbade the kissing of icons, cancelled weddings, cancelled funerals, cancelled baptisms, and forbade priests from caring for the elderly and dying.

kids in church

There were priests and bishops (whole synods even) who not only went along with every idiotic mandate, they actively endorsed following them as obedience to God. In many parishes, “Karens” took it upon themselves to scold the non-complying. They went so far as to scour social media, and report their own priests for lapses in COVIDIAN compliance – both in Church and in their own personal lives. Their constant scolding and reporting created an atmosphere of tension and mistrust that has never fully healed.

More than a few Orthodox bishops went above and beyond what the state asked of them. They kept their parishes closed, masked, attendance restricted, and/or restricted in other ways longer than local directives required. “Out of love for our neighbor”, many Orthodox completely forgot how we were supposed to behave during a plague. Too many priests and bishops even changed how we receive communion, supposedly out of fear that the common spoon could transmit disease. The multiple spoon controversy tore parishes and jurisdictions apart. In many ways the controversy is still with us today, simmering in the background just waiting for the next “crisis” to flare up again.

Archbishop Elpidophoros with multiple communion spoonsMany Orthodox hierarchs and clergy still claim multiple spoons are perfectly acceptable. The problem is with the ignorant laity who don’t understand their own faith. Even if those ignorant laity happen to be MDs, RNs, medical researchers, and noted Theologians.

In this article, we talked about the real damage being done by lockdowns to the poorest members of our society. Many bishops were silent. Too many bishops were outright supportive of lockdowns, school closures, and church closures. In this article, we explored if the bishops were really afraid of COVID, or of the government. In this article we told real stories of people who had been harmed by Church COVID policies, including an RN asked to leave her parish for the “safety” of others. In this article, we talked about the perspective of Orthodox parish priests who were being bullied by their bishops over COVID policies. We talked a lot about the multiple spoons controversy, but this article is a good summation of it. This article tells of a young man who wanted a blessing before going to military training, but was afraid to approach his parish priest on a morning the entire sermon was devoted to chastising the faithful for insufficiently following COVID protocols. This article explores the marketing efforts by some bishops on behalf of the COVID jabs. Marketing by trusted “religious authority figures” seems to have been particularly effective at increasing the uptake of a dangerous, ineffective, experimental “vaccine”. In this article, we talked about how badly future conformation to government edicts could go for us Orthodox.

We should also point out the blatant hypocrisy of many hierarchs who publicly violated the very COVID protocols they so scrupulously enforced on their parishes.

St Vladimir liturgy no masks COVID can infect you at the altar, but not when taking a picture.

Elpidophoros No Mask TweetAt a time when the elderly were not being attended by clergy and funerals were cancelled, the rules didn’t apply to an Archbishop.

Perhaps the worst was the refusal of so many Orthodox bishops to support Orthodox Christians in obtaining religious exemptions from the COVID jabs. Many bishops outright instructed their flocks to get the jabs, often saying it was their Christian duty to protect others. (Even though the indications were there from the beginning that the jabs did not stop “the spread”.) These pro-jab bishops excused the links of the jabs to abortion in ways that weakened Orthodoxy’s pro-life witness. The biggest offender was the Greek Archdiocese, which publicly, clearly, and viciously declared that Orthodox Christians had no right to a religious exemption from the jabs. Thanks be to God that American law does not require agreement with your religious hierarchs to get a religious exemption from a jab.

Real Orthodox Christians with real souls sustained real and lasting harm. Even as we continue to pray for our hierarchs, clergy, and each other – we cannot let that go. Especially since some of the worst COVIDIANs are doubling down on their horrible performances. In a recent interview, this is what Archbishop Elpidophoros had to say about the vax, science, and vaccine exemptions:

Q: You have been clear from the outset on the matter of the COVID vaccination: Yes to vaccination and no to exemption on religious grounds. So do you believe that there is no contradiction between science and faith? Can the two coexist?

 

A: Not only is there no contradiction between faith and science, but there is absolute harmony. Science is God’s gift to humankind; it is the gift of knowledge through which each of us discovers the miracle, the wealth, and the diversity of creation. And in all of these, we discover the God, Creator Himself.

 

There is a wonderful phrase in Church history, according to which “faith seeks understanding.” This perception is the stark opposite of the proverbial saying “believe and do not question.” We can never claim that our faith or our knowledge is perfect. As the Apostle Paul points out, “Now we only see a reflection as in a mirror.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Consequently, we navigate our lives with reason (insofar as science is concerned) and with faith (insofar as our church life is concerned). If our motivation is the power of love, and not the love of power, then we will be able to find the necessary balance. For science cannot replace religion, but neither is religion in a position to replace science. Such an argument would have been condemned by the Church Fathers as arrogant.

 

After all, science and the Church are not searching for different truths. There may be a distinction, but there must be no dichotomy between the transcendent and the worldly, between heaven and earth.

Never was a man so full of himself with so little justification.

Anyone paying attention knew two years ago that TheScience™! was a slogan being used to cover up massive corruption and politicization in our public health establishment. We published dozens of articles by Orthodox RNs, MDs, and other experts all saying the same things – the jabs being pushed on the American people were poorly researched, dangerous, ineffective, and unnecessary. In the meantime, safe and effective treatments and preventions were being suppressed to create a need for massively expensive, and profitable, “vaccines”. We were not alone. Tens of thousands of courageous health care and research professionals put their careers on the line to tell the truth.

Yet, here we are at the end of 2022 and Archbishop Elpidophoros, who helped give a prestigious award to the CEO of Pfizer for his “contribution” to humanity, is still pushing the pro-jab narrative. He is not alone, either. An OCA chancellor recently was caught chastising his clergy for spreading vaccine “misinformation”. He is still a believer, evidently. There are many more just like these two within Orthodoxy.

It is not enough to be silent about the COVID mistakes of the past. It is not enough to pretend it didn’t happen so we can “move on”. It is definitely not acceptable to keep pretending that you were somehow “right” in supporting Orthodox COVIDism. From the lowly parish Karens to the exalted ranks of the Episcopacy – all of you must publicly repent and promise to do better. If you can’t, or won’t, then go with God. We love you. We pray for you. But regardless of who you are, we will never trust you again.

—Orthodox Reflections Staff

Below are some articles on how we would have liked to see our bishops and clergy face the Pandemic:

Apostolic Boldness from Abbot Tryphon: God Arranges Everything for Our Salvation

Faith Over Fear – Apostolic Boldness in the Age of COVID

Orthodox Christian COVID Heroes

Bishop Irenei – The Church Will Never Alter Her Beliefs or Practices Out of Fear

Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou Defends Orthodoxy Against Covid Restrictions

St. Dionysius’ Paschal Encyclical – Orthodox Faith in Time of Plague

Let No One Fear Death: Orthodox Christian Leaders Respond to the Covid-19 Challenge

Bold Orthodox Leadership is Necessary to Avoid the COVID Backlash

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