Overtaken By Events

Despite Tuesday's updated CDC guidance, this PSA from the California state health department continued to appear on Facebook yesterday. Although the CDC distinguishes between the vaxxed and unvaxxed, clearly this is unenforceable on a sidewalk or transit platform or in a public park. As a practical matter, unless an indoor restaurant strictly enforces the mask rule -- though they'd also have to ask for evidence of vaccination if they did -- masks have basically become optional.

And it's worth noting that it was only on March 30, a mere month ago, that Dr Walensky, the head honcho of the entire US public health establishment, gave her weepy warning of impending COVID doom. Some Cassandra.

But there are lurking questions that, so far, nobody seems to be asking, much less answering. California completely avoided the February-March third surge in COVID cases that was limited mainly to the US northeast. But vaccine became available to all states, with equally limited distribution, in mid-December. California experienced just as many of the new varieties as any other state, and it had just as much travel in and out (but Arizona's and Nevada's COVID patterns are similar to California's). And so far, the vaccines have proven effective against the new varieties.

Yet California is in fact heading toward that word nobody is daring to use, "herd immunity". As of yesterday, 39% of those in the state are "fully vaccinated', at least two weeks past their last shot. LA County has announced that, after three weeks in the "orange" tier, it will almost certainly qualify to move to the still less restrictive "yellow" tier by the middle of next week. The recent trend suggests that the rest of the state will follow within weeks.

The received wisdom from the Mayo Clinic, which reflects the view of the public health establishment, is this:

Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the pandemic. This number of infections could lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have existing health conditions. The health care system could quickly become overwhelmed.

. . . But reaching herd immunity through vaccination against COVID-19 might be difficult for many reasons.

The U.S. is currently making progress toward herd immunity through a combined approach.

. . . Given the challenges, it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity.

The example of California suggests that the process can take place much faster, and with far fewer vaccinations, than the public health establishment has anticipated. In fact, the pause in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine looks to have been done mostly to try to slow things down, since after dithering for a week and a half, the experts just said "never mind".

The question has been raised in many venues why the US Congress, which is assumed to have been fully vaccinated for months, chose nevertheless to be masked and socially distanced for President Biden's address, when even CDC guidelines now suggest this was unnecessary. The answer is that the people who run the planet are clearly reluctant to drop the controls that, however ineffective at stopping multiple surges of COVID, have nevertheless apparently served whatever obscure purpose they've been serving.

What a shame that the public panic is going to go away, later if not sooner. The problem is the people we pay to protect the public health are the ones who'll be least likely to recognize this.

California Is Still A Puzzle

The map above shows California's COVID status as of April 27, just two days ago. Most counties are now in the "orange" tier, and this covers nearly 90% of the state population. "Orange" restrictions are still stricter than in many other states, but they do allow most indoor activities at 50% capacity.

What's remarkable is how quickly conditions have improved. The map at right is from just a month ago, March 30, with far fewer counties in the "orange" tier, most still "red" and three in "purple". Over the course of just a month, most of the state changed from "red" to "orange", with the three worst cases leaving "purple, while two more became "yellow". At this point, it appears that over the course of May, most of the state will move to "yellow", though this will still be more restrictive than other states like Florida or Arizona.

But here's the continuing puzzle. I've already noted that Los Angeles County in particular has been very aggressive in locating vaccination sites in the poorest areas, but from the second map above, it's been unique in this. Earlier this year, once vaccine became available, the county was very quick to move from "purple" through "red" to "orange", but other counties like Fresno, with many poor residents but apparently not quite as aggressive, nevertheless followed LA County from "purple" to "orange", lagging by only weeks.

The fact is that, as the maps show, there have been no stubborn problem areas anywhere in the state. All the counties have been improving and making progress from tier to tier within weeks of each other. The maps are just snapshots.

LA County health department press releases, while carefully worded, have begun to indicate that even with aggressive efforts to make vaccine available in the poorest areas, uptake there hasn't been as expected.

The pandemic also disproportionately affected Non-White populations in the County. The impact on Pacific Islanders was particularly severe, with nearly 6 times as high a hospitalization rate as among White residents, and more than 3 times as high a death rate. Although Latino/Latinx residents were hospitalized at only 2.9 times as high a rate as White residents, they died from their infections at 3 times as high a rate. Black/African American (1.7), American Indian/Alaskan Native (1.6), and Asian (1.3) residents also died of COVID-19 at rates higher than those of White residents.

And,

The County has now vaccinated about half of Asian, White, and American Indian/Alaska Native residents in L.A. County and have also made some important gains in vaccinating multiracial community members, where vaccinations increased from 11% to 37% with one dose. In Latinx residents, the vaccinated proportion of the population increased more than fourfold of what it was two months ago, and in Black residents, the proportion increased more than threefold.

Despite all efforts, the impact has still been most severe on Latins. This is probably why the counties in the San Joaquin Valley have been slower (though by a matter of only weeks) to move from "red" to "orange", as they have a high proportion of poor agricultural workers, who are mostly Latin. In turn, the reason for this is that Latins are the group most likely not to have their immigration status in order, and vaccination does require that one register. Best not to do anything that could bring attention to themselves, clearly.

But then, with a certain substantial part of the population, which is the poorest and sickest, resisting vaccination, why is California otherwise doing so well, the best in the US and up there with the best in the world? I've got to think that, since all US states have received vaccines in the same proportion, and California counties have all been improving individually and apparently doing better than many US states, other factors besides just vaccines are involved.

But I don't think it's lockdowns. The most severe lockdowns in the country had no effect on the late 2020 surge in California. There must be another factor besides vaccines.

Panic Dissipating?

There's been a stir about yesterday's updated CDC mask guidelines, but I think the takeaway is that they're largely semantic and at this point, without tattoos on people's foreheads showing their vaccine status, completely unenforceable, even by the most zealous Karens. With the chart above in mind, let's say an unvaccinated person decides to eat at an outdoor restaurant without a mask. Since there's no requirement that he wear a lanyard with his vaccine slip in a clear plastic holder, there's no way anyone can check if he's fully vaccinated or not and thus permitted to go maskless.

Even it a Karen has her suspicions, if she confronts him in a huff, the unvax can simply huff back at her to mind her own business, and the other patrons more likely than not will shout her down as well. But the relaxation overall is pretty pusillanimous, and it's actually based on nothing new. At least in LA County, it was always OK to go jogging or bike riding without a mask. Beyond that, Dr Fauci has in effect been acknowledging that this whole mask thing has never been common sense, even when he said it was:

The CDC guidelines allow people who have been fully vaccinated (defined as being at least two weeks removed from their last shot) to do things such as walk, bike or eat at an outdoor restaurant without masks. Pretty much everything except congregating in large groups of strangers is considered safe, and even then, a mask should protect you, according to the guidelines.

“You can do so many of the things that are common-sense things,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told WTOP.

But depending on the state they lived in, people could do all these things without the shot, and still can, with infection statistics generally better than in states where they couldn't. And for Dr Fauci, common sense is how he feels at the moment anyhow. Last January, he was saying it was common sense to wear not one mask, but two:

During an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s TODAY earlier this week, he was asked for his thoughts on if wearing two masks would make a difference.

“It likely does because this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in,” Dr. Fauci told Guthrie. “So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective. That’s the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.”

So by January's standards, if you're vaccinated, you're obviously still safer if you wear a mask, so why not keep wearing one? Indeed, why not keep wearing two? It's pretty clearly a case of what will keep Fauci on the Sunday talks, which I think this sequence shows. He knows what he can get away with, even with Savannah Guthrie.

But there are other signs that the mood is improving. After the Chauvin verdict, despite several new well-publicized officer involved shootings, the riots haven't resumed -- and there was some justified fear that the riots would resume whatever the verdict. And the precipitous decline in Oscar viewership shows the public is increasingly tired of woke. This has been carrying over to big-league sports as well.

We aren't dealing witbh epidemiological issues here. The COVID crisis was never the Black Death nor ebola, neither polio nor yellow fever. With an estimate of 5 million deaths worldwide that I saw recently, it's about 10% the size of the 1918 Spanish flu, with an estimate of 50 million. But short of vaccine, public health efforts to curb COVID via masks and lockowns have been feckless, and we're seeing little insight so far into how the disease actually spread.

The problem has been one of moral panic, not public health.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Record

The North American ordinariate began its life with several major disappointments, and it's never really recovered. It's now in a situation where the first generation of priests who came in with early groups has reached retirement age, but, as in the case of Fr Ousley, their replacements don't have equivalent background or experience. My regular correspondent from the old blog outlines the record as the ordinariate approaches ten years of age:

We have frequently discussed the conspicuous failures among the Ordinariate communities: the small, struggling “continuing” groups which became small, struggling Catholic groups, the groups gathered as ordination opportunities for clergy who have subsequently retired or moved on to local diocesan posts or otherwise departed from the scene. But the apparently successful communities also reveal grave weaknesses.

In ten years only eleven groups have achieved full parish status. Four of those were inherited from the Pastoral Provision, so in fact only seven groups have achieved this goal under the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus. And the parochial status of one of them—-St Luke, Ft Washington—-is somewhat problematic as it shares a building and a pastor with the local diocese, suggesting that it is not actually a self-sustaining congregation.

You have reported on the problems of St Barnabas, Omaha, now awaiting the arrival of its third pastor since joining the Ordinariate in 2013. Fr Bengry seems to be holding it together on his own at St John the Evangelist, Calgary, but that situation, including its odd financing, is a ticking time bomb. We hear little about Incarnation, Orlando and Mt Calvary, Baltimore, but we will assume that their situation is stable.

Christ the King, Towson seems to be relatively thriving; my only concern is that it seems to be unduly centred on the Meeks family. Liturgically and musically it resembles a typical OF parish, with lengthy sermons by Fr Meeks which have been faithfully posted every Sunday on YouTube for the last decade.

Like the much smaller St Timothy, Sykesville whose live-stream video drew wails of horror when it was posted on Ordinariate-themed FB pages a few months ago, CTK is a liturgical outlier whose members would find little to attract them at a typical OCSP mass.

So, this is all there is to show, and it’s not much.

All the ordinariate parishes are at best marginal. What's struck me about my experience of the diocesan Church is how much it contradicts the traditionalist stereotypes of gay clergy, happy-clappy liturgy, and declining interest. Cardinal Mahony and the St John's Seminary in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles have been consistent targets of traditionalists, but the senior priests we've encountered who've been products of the seminary and ordained by Mahony are impressive men who set inspirational examples, and the younger priests who've followed them are just as good -- a number have passed through our parish, and they're pretty exceptional.

Why woukld people who've voluntarily become Catholic, presumably with no emotional or family ties to declining parishes, want nevertheless to isolate themselves in a ghetto of retro mediocrity? The only upside to this seems to be how few people wish to do it.

More COVID Contrasts

It's starting to look like vaccines, no matter how indifferently distributed, are the magic bullet that will solve COVID. But so far, governments to one degree or another are becoming disappointed that this is the case. I saw reports of a mass demonstration in London last Saturday:

Videos posted to social media showed streets jammed with mostly maskless protestors. One marcher carried a sign reading “They did not isolate a virus. They isolated you.” Others said “No to vaccine passports” and “Lockdowns kill”.

Some reports put the crowd size at 10,000.

Lockdown measures have already started to lift in the UK with restaurants and pubs given the greenlight for outdoor eating and drinking on April 12. Gyms and hair salons were also permitted to open and further restrictions are set to be lifted May 17 at the earliest.

Curious, I went to see the UK's COVID chart. To my surprise, it looks a great deal like California's, which is the best in the US. But California continues to have fairly stringent controls, which themselves contrast to many US states, where controls of any sort, including mask mandates, have been lifted entirely. Even so, in California, most counties have reached the "orange" tier, which allows things like 50% indoor dining and outdoor drinking in bars. Depending on the county, these have been in effect for weeks.

And this is in one of the strictest US COVID regimes. In Texas, the lockdown is yeasterday's issue. So far, COVID passports haven't been raised as a serious option in the US. UK media seems stumped that citizens, like Oliver Twist, seem to be asking for more. How ungrateful they are for what the government has already granted them!

But even in the US, Dr Fauci has been slow-walking relaxations that even he acknowledges are common sense:

Face masks have taken an increasingly central role in debate lately as many have questioned the continued and widespread use of masks even as vaccinations continue to soar nationwide. A Georgia mother went viral this week after she sounded off on her local school board continuing its mask mandate through next year.

. . . "What I believe you’re going to be hearing, what the country is going to be hearing soon, is updated guidelines from the CDC," Fauci told ABC News' "This Week." "The CDC is a science-based organization. They don’t want to make any guidelines unless they look at the data and the data backs it up."

"But when you look around at the common sense situation, the risk is really low, especially if you’re vaccinated," he said.

I can only be happy that the US political culture is driving reopenings much more forcefully than in most of the world.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Model

Anglicanorum coetibus and the complementary norms themselves aren't specific about how the groups that enter the Catholic Church as bodies of former Anglicans are organized, but explanations at the time of the constitution's promulgation generally assumed they were existing Anglican parishes that wouid enter with their Anglican clergy. This is at least implied in the constitution itself:

§4 The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate.

Early publicity focused on parishes that would enter, not only as continuing corporate entities, but with property and endowments as well as their clergy and people. Very few did this, and the attempt of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish, which did have significant property and endowment, was a spectacuilar failure driven in large part by the complacency of Steenson and the people around him.

But this and other failures in the early months of the North American ordinariate led almost immediately to departures from the model. A visitor who often contributed to the old blog points out this difficulty:

Fr Ousley, the Pastor of St John the Baptist, Bridgeport, PA, is retiring in June, at 70. He went to Yale and Nashotah House, and has a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. He served as a TEC clergyman for twenty years, and in the ACA for a further fourteen. He led 25 members of his ACA congregation into the Ordinariate. and later merged the group with the John Henry Newman Fellowship led by David Moyer after it became clear that the latter would not be proceeding to ordination.

The combined group later bought a surplus church and rectory from the local diocese (they had plenty to choose from) and has been raised to the status of a full parish in the OCSP. They have undertaken a number of repairs and improvements to the property. I give this history in detail because it presumably represents what was envisioned as the Ordinariate template: an established formerly “Anglican” clergyman and his congregation with the resources to maintain a church and a full program of parish life. But this ideal has remained elusive.

Most of the former clergy coming forward for ordination in the Ordinariate served as “Anglican” clergy only briefly, or not at all and they bring no former parishioners. Some became Catholic years ago but did not previously pursue ordination, or at least did not pursue it successfully. A few have gathered a “Pre-Ordinariate” group, but this model, once the norm, is now uncommon.

The announced replacement for Fr Ousley is Fr William Cantrell. He is about ten years younger than Fr Ousley and was ordained for the OCSP in December 2013 after 24 years as a TEC military chaplain. He has never served with an Ordinariate community even in an assistant capacity but has continued his work as a chaplain in a VA hospital. This choice suggests to me that Bp Lopes had some staffing issues: St John the Baptist, Bridgeport is a full-time job but cannot provide a full-time stipend. Relevant pastoral/managerial experience is in short supply.

The early anticipation was that there would be two Philadelphia-area parishes, one formed around David Moyer and the other around Fr Ousley. Within weeks, this prospect proved unworkable, with the two groups proving far smaller than expected, with neither bringing in property. The result has been a single marginal parish whose ability to maintain or improve its aging and obsolete property is in fact far from assured.

Even among the handful of parishes that came in under the original model, with property, endowment, and clergy, leaving aside the former Pastoral Provision parishes for the time being, none has visibly prospered, while some, like St Barnabas Omaha, have suffered from mismanagement despite repeated changes in clergy.

But in fact, there have been few new communities of any sort, and few talented clergy to lead them. And even for those, there are few billets available to pay a full stipend, which compounds the problem, since the ordinariate clearly isn't seen as a rewarding career by potential new candidates. Instead, it's a last-chance career option for men who haven't succeeded in Protestant careers. Learning to code is in fact probably a better choice for such people.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: Leadership

Jeffrey Steenson, who was Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande from 2005 to 2007, was the third US Episcopal bishop to resign while in office in order to convert to Roman Catholicism. The first was Levi Silliman Ives, who was Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina from 1841 to 1852. The second was Frederick Joseph Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919.

The differences between Steenson and his predecessors are remarkable, in part perhaps reflecting Steenson's character, but also showing how times have changed. Both Ives's and Kinsman's resignations and conversions were moderately important public events, and in consequence, both Ives and Kinsman published detailed apologias, Ives in The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism and Kinsman in Salve Mater. (Kinsman is highly underrated as a writer, and since the book is on line, it's worth the read.)

Both of those bishops addressed a general audience with an understanding of broad historical and theological context. Steenson, at least so far, has produced no equivalent. The closest is The Causes For My Becoming Catholic, an 11-page address delivered to a 2008 meeting of the Anglican Use Society, a highly specialized in-group that has since become the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, whose primary purpose is to cheerlead for the so-called Anglican Patrimony in the Catholic Church. That both of Steenson's predecessors felt the need to address their decisions to the general public, while Steenson has not, is an indication of how far the prestige of The Episcopal Church fell over the 20th century.

What puzzles me is that, although this presentation gives ostensibly Aristotelian reasons for his conversion, it is deeply dishonest. Steenson resigned as bishop in 2007. He was received into the Catholic Church in December of that year, but, in an ongoing p;rogression not referenced in his talk, he was ordained a Roman Catholic transitional deacon in Rome in December 2008 by Cardinal Bernard Law, and his ordination as a Catholic priest took place in February 2009. These must certainly have been assured at the time of his 2007 resignation as bishop.

Also unmentioned in the 2008 talk was a 1993 meeting that he attended, arranged by Cardinal Law, with the now-late Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at that time Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and draft a proposal for an Anglican personal prelature that had been supported by Cardinal Law since the late 1970s. Documents at that time indicate that Bp Pope was anxious to keep the meeting confidential, as it involved the appointment of Pope himself as ordinary of this prelature, with the presumption that Steenson would be a number-two.

Any premature release of such information could conceivably result in inhibition, trial, and deposition of both under Episcopalian canon law for abandonment of communion. Naturally, whether actual charges would be brought against either would have been an iffy proposition in The Episcopal Church, and conviction would have been even more so -- but Steenson, still just a rector at the time, would at least have had his career prospects thwarted.

As it was, Steenson advanced to become Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, and then Bishop Coadjutor, and finally Bishop of that diocese in 2005. Had any word of the 1993 meeting leaked out, given the implied intent to leave The Episcopal Church to serve as a Catholic priest, there's no likelihood that he ever could have become an Episcopal bishop.

(It's notable that Steenson's successor as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, Michael Vono, complained that Steenson had betrayed his vows as a bishop. But I'm told that Vono himself is Broad Church, which suggests that his own interpretation of vows is flexible, and by Broad Church standards, Steenson was behaving impeccably as a bishop. But this goes to why the Catholic Church would ever wish to play footsie with Protestants of any stripe.)

In addition, it appears that Cardinal Law from the late 1970s had maintained contacts, either directly or through intermediaries, with dissident Episcopal clergy with the aim of bringing them into an Anglican personal prelature should the opportunity arise, which it did with the election of Joseph Ratzinger as pontiff in 2005. Anglicanorum coetibus was essentially the document drafted by Steenson as a result of the 1993 meeting.

Steenson made absolutely no mention of any of this in his 2008 talk, instead basically blaming Aristotle and a perfunctory vote of some Episcopalian bishops long after 1993. Even after resigning as bishop, he continued to conceal the circumstances and arrangements behind the resignation, and indeed, given the timeline, his 2008 ordination as a married Catholic priest was in clear anticipation of the 2009 promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus and his status as presumptive ordinary, announced in January 2012.

One remarkable feature of Steenson's brief tenure as ordinary -- he was replaced in 2015 by Bp Lopes -- is how little he accomplished. He is known chiefly for engineering a pit maneuver against David Moyer that prevented his ordination as a Catholic priest, as well as for provoking Fr Christopher Phillips into keeping the Our Lady of the Atonement parish out of the ordinarate until after the retirement of both. He was also a key factor in bungling the admission of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish into the ordinariate.

This is not a commendable record, but given the context of Steenson's career, it suggests that Steenson was adept at behind-the-scenes maneuver but not skilled at much else. But do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

The bottom line is that there's no comparison between Steenson and either Ives or Kinsman, and I seriously doubt we'll ever get an honest account from Steenson of his actual conversion and career, before or after becoming Catholic. .

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: How Anglicans Really Are

I keep thinking back to Fr Lengenecker's 2018 Lenten mission at our parish, where he gave very insightful remarks on Anglicanism that were actually just a brief digression in a much more extensive talk. One point that he made was that, given the wide spectrum of Anglican belief, after his years of experience in the denomination, if he listened to an Anglican for some minutes, he could discern roughly where the speaker stood in relation to the diagram above, but this would still be with only about 90% certainty.

The odd thing for me is that, in my 30 years as an Episcopalian, nobody gave me anything like the explanation in the diagram above. In my confirmation class, there wasn't even mention of a high church-low church polarity -- it was just the XXXIX Articles were established so everyone could compromise, but they never even reviewed the Articles themselves, which are very Protestant. It didn't matter, because everyone compromised.

It was only after I became Catholic and began to look into the matter that I realized that Bp James Pike, who denied the Trinity from the pulpit and was surrounded by public scandal, was a perfectly good Anglican of the broad church persuasion, and there have been bishops like Pike before and since who've been sanctioned far less than bishops who opposed innovations like gay marriage, or sanctioned not at all. This was one of the main issues that led to Frederick Kinsman's resignation as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware in 1919. Pike, or John Spong, or Eugene Robinson, was noothing new.

The emergence of "continuing" Anglicanism in the 1970s can be seen now, I think, as part of the more general decline of main line Protestantism, which was already shrinking and no longer represented a bourgeois consensus. Far more Episcopalians, after all, simply quit coming to church, than the relatively small numbers who broke away into the dozens of tiny "continuing Anglican" denominations. And the numbers of continuers are now shrinking as cataclysmically as the numbers of Episcopalians.

The "continuers" can be placed (keeping Fr Longenecker's remarks in mind, with maybe 90% certainty) in the left part of the diagram above with the callout "new 'Anglican Orthodoxy', GAFCON". It's a combination of sorts, though a highly uneasy one, between low church dissidents like David Virtue and the largely defunct Anglo-Catholic blogs and websites, although the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is aligned with this wing of the movement. Most of the "continuing" groups are low church, but the few relatively high church groups like the Anglican Church in America are also rapidly shrinking and have been forced to merge for survival.

This is the environment into which Benedict XVI promulgated Anglicanorum coetibus. He appears to have been influenced chiefly by Bernard Law, who had been encouraging a small group of dissident Episcopalians behind the scenes since the late 1970s with the prospect of a personal prelature for Anglicans who wished to enter the Catholic Church as a body. The problem was that Law seems not to have understood this group very clearly, and he seems not to have understood Anglicans in general -- if Anglicans see their own doctrines, such as the XXXIX Articles, only as a departure point for compromise, they won't adjust well to the Catholic Church.

And most in that Anglican dissident continuum are low church. David Virtue was violently unsupportive of Anglicanorum coetibus and held unsuccessful efforts to go into the ordinariate by parishes like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood up to ridicule.

So Cardinal Law never understood the potential market for his idea. But the problem goes beyond that, because the actual intake in the North American ordinariate has been people who continue to dissent in the name of "orthodoxy", and not all of them are former Anglicans. As a vistor puts it,

Such growth as there is in Ordinariate congregations comes almost entirely from “disaffected Catholics”—-the “TLM-lite” crowd I think you call them—-although they often keep a foot in both Ordinariate and TLM communities. It is not uncommon for the same diocesan parish to host both EF and DW masses. So for the most part it’s poaching, not evangelism. Hence the emphasis on maintaining the elusive “Anglican Patrimony,” despite the fact that in the ten years I have been following this story I can see it devolving into “Tex-Mex” or General Tso’s Chicken right before my eyes.

Of course, the diagram above suggests any "Anglican patrimony" that exists is hard to parse indeed, and the loudest voices in the ordinariate who insist on it seem to be those who've spent little or no time in Episcopalian or Anglican Church of Canada parishes.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among US Catholic bishops that figures like Fr Zuhlsdorf must be brought to heel, and Bp Barron has become increasingly critical of the pre-Conciliarist movement, although he's careful to separate it from those who simply attend Latin mass. One ordinariate priest has already been removed and is apparently in the process of laicization for being openly pre-Conciliarist, but I dom't think he was ever the only problem.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Target Audience

In thinking over the past few months about why Anglicanorum coetibus failed, it occurs to me that nobody at the start of the project gave much thought to Anglicanism. This is puzzling, because there's been effective opinion within the Church all along that could have provided insight, most specifically by the former Episcopal Bishop of Delaware Frederick Kinsman. but other Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc have offered similar opinions.

Even the former Church of England priest Fr Dwight Longenecker, now a Catholic pastor in South Carolina, noted in a 2018 Lenten mission at our California parish that Anglicanism "looks like" Catholicism, but it isn't. Figures like Bernard Law, Joseph Ratzinger, Jeffrey Steenson, and others who drafted Anglicanorum coetibus at the start seem to have been lulled by appearances. It's a little like the warning about the coral snake: red touch yellow, kill a fellow.

The Complementary Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus simply breeze past the question of Anglicans -- it simply assumes that large mumbers of Anglicans are eager to become Catholic. The constitution itself refers to "groups of Anglicans" who have petitioned "repeatedly and insistently" to join the Church, as though the sacraments of initiation had previoiusly been denied them. Article 5, §1 of the Norms simply says

The lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition who wish to belong to the Ordinariate, after having made their Profession of Faith and received the Sacraments of Initiation, with due regard for Canon 845, are to be entered in the apposite register of the Ordinariate.

The Norms say little else about who is an Anglican, and more important, who Anglicans are. For starters, they're Protestants. It's worth noting that a key element of Protestant formation is that Protestantism arose because something was essentially wrong with the Catholic Church. I went through Presbyterian confirmation in my early teens and Episcopalian confirmation in my early 30s, and both had some version of that. For Anglicans, there's less insistence that the Christian faith went wrong with "accretions", but there's no question that Anglicans see themselves as a via media between extremes, of which Catholicism is clearly one.

This should have suggested to the drafters of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Norms that even candidates for confirmation who come from Anglican backgrounds would need greater attention to catechesis, but the assumption appears to have been that only some minimal touchup would be required. That so few actual Anglicans ever signed up for the North American ordinariate shows how badly the drafters understood the market. Recall that the original estimate given Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993 was 250,000 Episcopalians who would come in. The actual number, especially considering the number of non-Episcopalians who joined, is probably only in the low four digits.

At minimum, this suggests that the drafters badly underestimated the task of evangelization. Bp Barron, the USCCB's evangelization lead, sees riper fruit among "nones", people never reached by or affiliated with any Christian denomination, Catholic dropouts, and even New Atheists. Protestants of the traditional main line denominations are a cataclysmically shrinking group. "Non-denominational" Evangelicals are a different task. To a serious professional evangelizer like Bp Barron, it would appear that Episcopalians were never low-hanging fruit.

This accounts for the drafters' misunderanding of the target market, their assumption that Protestants of any stripe, whose spiritual identities are based on an inculcated notion that the Catholic Church is irrededemably corrupt in countless ways, would suddenly clamor for admission to that same Church whose demands in areas like sexuality, the sanctity of life, and ritual observance are regarded as unnecessary and even repugnant.

This accounts for their misunderstanding that Anglicans are Protestant, not just dreamy quasi-Catholic wannabes. That would be why there was so little uptake in the first place. But there's another misunderstanding of Anglicanism that reflects the problems within the body of the ordinariate faithful who did join, which I'll go into tomorrow.

I'm Going To Start A Series Of Posts On The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus

A visitor to my old blog sent me a cri de coeur on the situation at the cathedral of the North American Catholic ordinariate for former Anglicans, which I've published with comments at the old blog. It's been very good for me to become more detached from the ordinariate, of which I was never a member in any case, as I've steadily become more assimilated into the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church via a well-run parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Two things strike me. One is that my own experience of being Catholic has educated me in the meaning of this passage from the Vatican II constitution Lumen Gentium

Often the Church has also been called the building of God. The Lord Himself compared Himself to the stone which the builders rejected, but which was made into the cornerstone. On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles, and from it the Church receives durability and consolidation. This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of God in which dwells His family; the household of God in the Spirit; the dwelling place of God among men; and, especially, the holy temple. This Temple, symbolized in places of worship built out of stone, is praised by the Holy Fathers and, not without reason, is compared in the liturgy to the Holy City, the New Jerusalem. As living stones we here on earth are built into it.

It goes without saying that Protestant denominations do not recognize this in any but a figurative sense. It's also been hard for me to see members of the North American ordinariate projecting any real sense of this, nor any indication that Bp Lopes sees any responsibility to educate his flock about this.

And beyond that, his flock, having entered this new spiritual environment, seem still to be unhappy and disgruntled people -- the complaint in the link is just the most recent of the long succession of those I've received.

And perhaps related to this condition is the remarkable number of clergy scandals and removals the ordinariate has had, among well under a hundred priests, and in less than ten years.

This convinces me that even if there may still be detectable brain waves, the heart is dead. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'll make a series of posts on it.

More On The Dalton School Kerfuffle

When I posted Sunday on rhw headmaster's resignation at the uber-elite Dalton School, I thought it would be an easy short post on a day when I'd be preoccupied with installing my new desktop. But then yesterday I heard that Megyn Kelly, of all people, had gone public with scolding the headmaster, and a few people had noticed, so I wondered what else was up.

Let's keep in mind that Kelly is still presumably rich following her settlements with Fox and NBC, and at least arguably still famous, though she's past her sell-by date. But she destroyed her career doing as the lizard people told her to do in 2016, trying to ambush Trump, so I'm not sure why she's hanging around. The elites don't like her, and she doesn't like them -- unless they continue to fawn over her, which they aren't doing.

It turns out that Kelly has had a running Twitter feud with New York elite schools and New York itself since last year. She pulled her kids out of the equally tony Collegiate and Spence Schools, for wokeness, but remember that she went on Bill Maher to talk about it. It ain't about the kids.

Then I found a long piece in Vanity Fair from last Thursday, only days before the Dalton head's resignation, which clearly indicates that the conflict had been brewing for some time. And it sounds more and more like a tempest in a teapot.

The public blowup came in December, splashed across the pages of the New York Post: A handful of teachers at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s elite Upper East Side private schools, had written an eight-page, 24-point thought-starter document that aimed to reimagine Dalton’s approach to diversity and inclusion, bringing it more in line with the progressive facade it has long worn.

But this was just at Dalton, which as the srory implies had somehow been lagging behind the woke trend. Megyn herself came out last fall, according to the Maher story linked above:

Kelly first announced this decision in November 2020, citing as the catalyst the school’s curriculum which had “gone off the deep end” in terms of its left-leaning ideology, though critics have highlighted Kelly’s controversial past as an indication that she may be overreacting or deflecting from more important issues. One highlight from Kelly’s career in controversy was defending blackface costumes on Halloween, which lead to her termination from NBC.

So this is starting to look more and more like an intramural controversy among people who appear to be in the elite but are deeply insecure about it. A key indicator that they've arrived, among this particular set, is their kids' expensive private schools. So they're basically playing ain't-it-awful among themselves over things like the price of beachfront estates in the Hamptons. With a lot less effort, they could do a little research and networking and simply find a good school outside that social orbit, but they'd have to drop the mental habit of relating everything in their lives to that social orbit.

And of course, if they sent their kids to some school that just focused on real education, they'd lose the chance of getting them into Harvard. Which for the kids' sake would be all to the good, but that's not who we're dealing with.

So in the Twitter thread in which Megyn scolded Dalton, someone followed up:

Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.

I'm afraid the issue is less that the kids are having wokeness shoved down their throats because it's a bad thing than it's OK if the plebs's kids have it in plebs schools, but our kids don't deserve it, because they're special.

California's Approach To COVID

Above is a typical table of the type that can be found on the LA County Health Department website. It's updated daily. It appears that LA County's policies conform with California state policies. It's plain that LA County is carefully recording race, ethnicity, and poverty data on COVID cases. In general I would have questioned this before the current crisis, but what we see in just the death data is an indication of where the problems lie.

If you run vaccination clinics in poor Hispanic areas, you are going to do far more good with each shot there than in an affluenmt white area. That's all there is to it. So I quote from a recent LA County health department press release:

Testing results are available for nearly 6,272,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today's daily test positivity rate is 1%, the lowest test positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The test positivity rate peaked over 20% in late-December during the surge.

Nearly 5,400,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to people across Los Angeles County. Of these, nearly 3,500,000 were first doses and more than 1,900,000 were second doses. As of April 9, 71% of L.A. County residents 65 and older received at least one dose of the vaccine. In total, 41% of the County’s population 16 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine.

Los Angeles County expanded the number of sites offering vaccination services across the county from 566 locations last week to 709 vaccinations sites across the county this week; 266 sites are in the hardest hit communities. Vaccination sites across the county had capacity to administer nearly 734,000 doses this week. This week, 323,470 total doses were allocated to Los Angeles County.

There's an emerging consensus that California's COVID statistics are the best in the US. I simply don't know if other states are following similar policies. It does seem to me that the CDC ought to have data eqwuivalent to LA County's or California's for every state, and it ought to be asking whether every state, especially those that are now problem outliers like Michigan, are handing vaccinations the same way.

Clearfly s "preferential option for the poor" is a good strategy for society in general here.

I spent the weekend getting and installing a new desktop, as my old one died. I'm back up and fully running.

Panic Dissipating?

An item in this morning's news caught my eye: the head of Manhattan's uber-elite Dalton School is resigning, apparently due to pressure from parents who objected to his woke agenda.

Keep in mind that the true indicator of social standing isn't whether you went to an Ivy, it's the private secondary school you attended. The parents of those students have money and influence. Wokeness so far has been a form of preemptive submissioin by media, university, and corporate elites. If Dalton parents are dropping the program, this is an acknowledgement that it isn't working out for those elites.

In January, an anonymous group of parents wrote a letter objecting to Dalton’s new guidelines.

“Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class,” the letter read, according to the NY Post.

“Wildly inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity-training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum,” the parents added in their letter.

By February, the school’s director of DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) Domonic Rollins stepped down “in pursuit of other opportunities.”

The big takeaway here is that this isn't your grandfather's PTA. Not only did they complain, but they had the juice to get people fired.

The Questions Nobody Is Asking

Right after I posted yesterday, I found a piece on Yahoo News that asks questions nobody else has been asking.

After enduring a steep, nationwide surge over the holidays — followed by a decline in cases that was just as steep and just as widespread — America has entered a strange new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How strange? Just look at the wildly uneven outbreaks unfolding right now in California, Florida and Michigan.

Nationally, the pace of vaccinations continues to accelerate, with an average of 3 million doses being administered every day. Yet the spread of variants such as B.1.1.7 — a strain that’s more contagious and deadly than earlier versions of the virus — is accelerating too. As a result, cases have started to level off or even inch up nationally, and experts are debating whether a so-called fourth wave is upon us.

It’s a race between the vaccines and the variants, they say.

But the truth is a bit more complicated — and perhaps a bit less scary. Zooming in on California, Florida and Michigan helps explain why.

These big states have some things in common. All three previously experienced large waves of infection. All three have at least partially vaccinated about a third of their residents, with California at 35 percent, Michigan at 31 percent and Florida at 31 percent, in line with the U.S. overall. And all three appear to be rife with variants; nationwide, Florida, Michigan and California currently rank No. 1, No. 2 and No. 6, respectively, in the number of B.1.1.7 cases detected to date.

Yet their COVID-19 outbreaks couldn’t be more different.

These are the same questions I've been asking, and they're among those not being put to Dr Fauci.

I'm having computer hardware issues, so posting may be sporadic until they're resolved.

The Public Health Establishment Is In Disagreement Over Vacccines

Buried deep in a CNN story about the Michigan COVID surge, I found this:

Though the virus appears to be spreading unchecked in those under age 59, those with a few months of vaccine eligibility (age 60 and up) have an impressively stable (and low) infection rate. This makes Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's plea to President Joe Biden for more vaccines all the more logical though, as the administration pointed out when they rejected Whitmer's request, giving more vaccines to Michigan will mean fewer for the surrounding (and other) states.

This bears out the view expressed by the LA County health department that the vaccines are in fact highly effective. But if, as the story says, Michigan has vaccinated in the neighborhood of 25% of its population, roughly the same as other states, this raises the question of whether Michgan has been vaccinating the right people. California for the first several months of vaccine distribution specifically targeted those most likely to become infected, which showed immediate effects. If Michigan is vaccinating a lot of people -- affluent suburbanites, for instance -- who aren't likely to get sick, it's wasting time and vaccine.

Beyond that is this story at MSN:

The political dynamics have changed markedly in recent weeks as vaccination rates have grown, warmer weather has returned, and the public and business owners have become increasingly vocal about reopening schools and loosening restrictions around social gatherings.

“I think we have a real compliance issue if we try to go back to the sort of restrictions that were in place in March and April of last year,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Zabel, a Democrat who had supported previous shutdown orders by Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat. “I don’t think there’s any appetite for that in Pennsylvania at all.”

. . . Other governors also are staying on course to reopen society as they simultaneously expand vaccine eligibility, potentially complicating President Joe Biden's efforts to conquer the pandemic.

Thus it isn't just states like Texas and Florida that are ignoring the CDC, it's states with continuing surges like Michigan and Pennsylvania. They're becoming more aware, I think, of continuing legal and electoral challenges to strict orders that seem less and less effective.

But this raises another issue, whether the CDC is actually working against solving the problem. There's no question that Drs Walensky and Fauci advocate indefinite masking and social distance, no matter how effective the vaccines prove. A tweet thread by Dr Vinay Prasad of the University of California at San Francisco outlines the problem:

CDC messaging on restrictions post vax has been a mess

The q is not: is there 0% change of spread after vax (ans: almost surely no)

The Q is: do precautions have a reasonable ARR (w/ real compliance) post vac? (ans, also almost surely no)

My sense is that the effectiveness of vaccines, properly targeted, crept up on the CDC in particular. I think it's significant that nobody (UPDATE: Yahoo News finally noticed) has mentioned the case of California, which as far as I can see has been unique in specifically targeting the most vulnerable populations, indeed with incentives to meet quotas in the poorest areas. Doing this in the first months of vaccine distribution had spectacular results.

On the other hand, before the vaccines became available in mid December 2020, even though California had something like 98% compliance with masks and distancing, those measures clearly had no effect on the late 2020 surge there -- as they had no effect anywhere else.

Nor would I rule out the CDC deciding to "pause" all the vaccines, putatively to avoid inevitable bad reactions, but actually to extend the crisis. But I don't think they'd have supprt even among their colleagues.

I think the lack of a united front among the CDC, blue governors, and other health authorities suggests the panic is slowly waning, and the public is losing patience with efforts to extend it. Things will improve when Drs Walensky and Fauci begin to recognize their 15 minutes of fame has expired. Michigan

The Death Of Limbaugh And The 2020 Moral Panic

I've frequently discussed the 2020 dumpster fire here as a "moral panic", an upheaval in public opinion similar to the Salem witch trials or the day-care Satanism wave of the 1980s, a widespread fear that some ill-defined evil threatens the well-being of society. Observers suggest that moral panics stem from underlying social insecurity, with particular issues and "devils" serving only as what an Aristotelian would call efficient or proximate causes, not the underlying reason.

I'm now thinking that the single event that drove the whole 2020 moral panic, before the COVID lockdowns, before the George Floyd riots, was Rush Limbaugh's announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Let me make it plain that, while I often found Limbaugh entertaining, I was never a dittohead, and I think in recent years he'd lost his sharp satirical edge, though he almost never had three hours of material to fill a three-hour show, and it was often padded with predictable bloviation.

But I had a sudden moment of epiphany the other night as I watched a TV program on, of all things, Swanson's TV Dinners. One of the analysts made a telling point, that TV Dinners became enormously popular at a time when there were effectively three TV networks that created a cultural consensus, which included the enormous cultural change of people watching television at dinner hour in the family room, eating frozen pre-prepared food off "TV tables". This trend took off like a rocket in the mid to late 1950s, and by 1968, Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

This is yet another of the remarks LBJ may or may not have uttered, but reflect a perception of cultural trends that suggests that if he didn't say them, he should have. Walter Cronkite was a dinner-hour TV Dinner talking head that somehow reflected a single national consensus, driven by a de facto single national media.

The national media figure who began to undermine that 30-year media consensus in the late 1980s was Rush Limbaugh. By 2009, public exchanges between Limbaugh and Barack Obama cemented Limbaugh's stature, as in presidential remarks equivalent to LBJ's, Obama said, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," The Guardian at the link noted,

He is the highlight of the rural American lunch hour, and his strong, confident voice can be heard in mechanic's shops, petrol stations and barbershops every day. He is – as he claims – an excellent broadcaster, a shameless and skilful self-promoter and a mover and shaker among the conservative elite.

Note the reference to Limbaugh suggesting, as with Cronkite, a dominant presence at mealtimes and in US culture, as well as a presidential acknowedgement of each figure's importance.

But it's also now recognized that Limbaugh had an impact on media equivalent to the TV Dinner's impact on American eating habits. According to the Poynter Institute,

Rush Limbaugh was more than a talk radio host. He was a key element in the development of the highly partisan journalism and other media that envelop us today.

Limbaugh’s talk radio program was not possible until the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the fairness doctrine. That policy, which began in 1949, was rooted in the idea that radio and TV stations were “public trustees” and as such should serve the entire nation and on the local level serve the communities to which they were licensed. The doctrine required them to air competing views on important issues. The idea was for broadcasters not to take sides.

. . . Along came President Ronald Reagan who, like other conservatives, didn’t like the fairness doctrine. The feeling was that news media lean liberal and the marketplace should determine content. With the support of FCC Commissioner Mark S. Fowler, the commission announced in 1987 that the government would no longer enforce the fairness doctrine. The commission reasoned that with the rise of cable television there were lots of viewpoints available to the public that did not exist when only print and over-the-air broadcasting were the only conduits to the public.

Now of course, pace LBJ, Walter Cronkite wasn't middle American at all. Cronkite's style was stentorian, patrician, Episcopalian, Brooks Brothers. Limbaugh was irreverent, Evangelical, a late-blooming college dropout, former disc jockey and low-level football flack who'd bucked his family tradition of becoming a lawyer. Limbaugh was the middle American, not Cronkite.

When Cronkite met his reward, nobody much cared, he was part of a bygone age by then, predeceased by the likes of John Cameron Swayze, Douglas Edwards, and Chet Huntley. They hadn't changed anything much, since Americans kept watching the nightly news over their TV dinners even as the talking heads changed -- but the talking heads were saying what they were told to say anyhow, which didn't change over that time.

The problem with Limbaugh was that he changed a great deal, and whether he passed away didn't cancel those changes out. He was an early pioneer of independent media, and he simply created a whole new market. When he announced his cancer diagnosis and Trump awarded him the Medal of Freedom during a State of the Union, the lizard people simply woke up and realized that, attack Limbaugh as they might, he'd be gone soon enough, as he was, but he was the guy who'd squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube, and they weren't going to be able to push it back in. He'd given the plebs a voice, not lectured them as their better.

This is the source of the elites' panic and desperation. The nodes of the panic, masks and social distance, riots by the urban underclass threatened by disappearance of the destructive policies that sustain it, and the corporate attempts to restrict speech, are all results of the social uncertainty created by media no longer under elites' complete control.

California Lifts Indoor Church Limits

Yesterday, California lifted all explicit limits on capacity and location of indoor worship in the state, although the state health department continued to say that indoor gatherings are “strongly discouraged" and advised limiting the numbers to the existing percerntages given under the state's color coded tiers. For most of the state, depending on the county, those limits are currently either 25% or 50% capacity.

There is no change to the requirements for social distancing and masks, and choral and congregational singing are also still prohibited. (However, our priests increasingly pat people on the shoulders, and congregational responses are slowly returning. So far, no Karens have intervened.)

Most news reports say that this was in response to the US Supreme Court's injunction this past Friday against Santa Clara County enforcing a ban on any indoor home worship. This was argued by the Center for American Liberty in the case of Tandon v Newsom.

At the crux of the lawsuit was Newsom’s disparate treatment of at-home religious gatherings, which Newsom arbitrarily limited to three households while permitting secular gatherings in other settings to take place in significantly higher numbers.

. . . The Court ruled that California’s regulation of at-home religious gatherings was “not neutral and generally applicable, and therefore trigger[ed] strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.” The Court explained, “California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

“Here, in the case of a rule banning different families from gathering in a private home to pray together, the Court recognized that any time the government burdens religious activity with special rules, it must bear the burden of strict scrutiny, and in this case, it could not meet that test. We are grateful that the First Amendment rights of our clients were recognized by the Court in overturning the 9th Circuit,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty.

However, another pro-religious freedom public-interest law firm, Liberty Counsel, noted that the state's lifting of more general restrictions on indoor worship came as a response to the court's potential action in a different case:

In response to Liberty Counsel’s request for an emergency injunction pending appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, Governor Gavin Newsom wrote yesterday that “mandatory limits on attendance are no longer imposed on houses of worship.”

Since this case is still pending and has been active since mid-2020, Liberty Counsel sees the governor's action as a strategic withdrawal in the face of potential appeal in this case as well, given the Supreme Court's consistent recent record of supporting the natural right of freedom to worship in five recent cases. The state's strategy has generally been to try to convince the court not to get involved, since the governor, relaxing the restrictions at issue, makes the case moot -- but then, this enables him simply to reinstate the same restrictions whenever convenient.

Liberty Counsel represents Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor twice. This case is still pending at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that the district court ruling be reversed. Unless and until there is a judicial declaration that Governor Newsom has acted unconstitutionally, there is nothing keeping him from changing his mind again, whether in this crisis or any future crisis.

As a result, the governor's action represents a temporary victory, but efforts clearly continue to extend and preserve the right to freedom of worship. Two other Southern California cases now seem to be in limbo, the Grace Community Church case in Sun Valley and the Godspeak Calvary Chapel case in Thousand Oaks. These came up last summer when both churches resumed indoor services with neither mandatory masks nor social distancing, which were at the time (and effectively continue to be) forbidden under state COVID rules, notwithstanding there has been some relaxation of specifics in recent weeks.

The effect of this week's most recent relaxation on these two cases, as well as Harvest Rock in Pasadena, is unclear. It appears that the individual judges have been kicking the can down the road, recognizing that the legal and epidemiological situations are constantly changing and apparently unwilling to create a permanent resolution while the situation is so fluid.

The state's announcement clearly puts some individual churches' and parishes' COVID measures at local option. Our diocesan Catholic parish has been playing things by ear in the wake of recent relaxations. In response to last November's Supreme Court orders, Los Angeles County itself in effect allowed indoor worship but left specific capacity up to parish or church judgment. Our parish continues to hold some masses indoors, some outdoors, and some as drive-ins in the parking lot, with the latter the most popular. The weather has been favorable.

While pews are roped off, the ushers have never specifically counted attendance and kept anyone from entering. A return to full indoor masses will clearly depend as much on the comfort level of individual members as on state restrictions. Our impression is that, especially since Easter, people have been returning to all masses in greater numbers.

Dr Walensky Reveals A Tell

I've been wondering about Michigan now for more than a week, and the COVID surge there is finally getting full media attention. Clearly the state has now emerged as the worst case in the US, with ideas from various quarters on what to do about it:

COVID-19 cases have started spiking in Michigan, which currently has the highest number of positive tests per 100,000 in the nation. The state’s seven-day average is 515 per 100,000. The next closest state is New Jersey, with 300.

. . . In October of 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Whitmer of the emergency powers she had assumed during the pandemic, declaring the orders an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.” Now, faced with increasing COVID-19 spread, the governor is powerless to issue the same kind of restrictions she did in the past without the Republican-controlled legislature’s consent. With the friction between the branches caused by her overarching actions earlier in the pandemic, getting back her authority to act is not likely.

In reponse, although Gov Whitmer has asked for voluntary compliance with new restrictions, the reply from schools and businesses has been that they don't intend to make changes. In response, Gov Whitmer has asked the federal government to increase its supply of COVID vaccines to the state. The Biden administration has so far refused, but the strangest take by far is from Dr Walensky:

“When you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccines — in fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response,” Walensky said in a briefing with reporters. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics, to go back to where we were last spring, last summer… to flatten the curve, decrease contact with one another, to test to the extent we have available, to contact trace.”

It goes without saying that the question being asked all over independent media is where has this woman been for the past 13 months? She's advocating a new "two weeks to flatten the curve"? But, stripped of her legal authority to impose a new lockdown, this is no longer an option for Gov Whitmer. Her alternative is to ask for more vaccine.

One puzzle for me is what Dr Walensky does all day in her office, and indeed, what her staff does as well, besides run for lattes. Nowhere in any media, beyond that, is anyone asking the big question, what about California? Every US state began receiving allocations of vaccine from mid-December 2020. No state got all the vaccine it wanted. California immediately distributed its limited supply to elder care homes and those over 75, who would benefit most.

Although I questioned this at first, it also began incentivizing vaccine distribution to the poorest zip codes, again on the basis that if cases were highest there, each dose would prevent more new cases. The result was that California turned the late 2020 surge around by mid-January, and the COVID data has continued to fall to the point that the state is now at levels comparable to those a year ago.

Surely a CDC director, charged with following effective epidemiological strategies, is aware of this. I won't even say she ought to be aware of this. She's smart. She's made it to the top of a system with lots of smart people. She knows about this. Why isn't she asking the obvious question, what is California doing that Michigan isn't? But I bet that, since she's smart, she knows the answer.

Instead, she gives the dinosaur brain answer from more than a year ago: Gov Whitmer, just say two weeks to flatten the curve. That'll fix it! From the link above,

White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt told Michigan officials to “follow the science.” Science says those 65 and older with comorbidities are at the highest risk for COVID-19-related mortality. One might assume following science would mean getting shots into those individuals as quickly as possible in an identified hotspot.

The implication from the White House is that Michigan hasn't been doing what California has been doing for four months, but it appears that nobody in authority is quite willing to come out and say that. But it's hard to avoid thinking Gov Whitmer and her staff have either been slow-walking effective vaccine distribution or simply incompetent at it, which is resulting in a Canadian situation. And Dr Walensky's public advice is effectively to do the worst possible thing, the one thing that will continue the crisis.

The vaccine isn't the answer -- oh, no, "we know the vaccine will have a delayed response". But "flatten the curve" will have no effect at all!

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that the most powerful wing of the public health establishment, at the Fauci-Walensky level, has never wanted vaccines, which it sees as a Trump program, no matter its clear success in places like California, whose own public health authorities are anything but Trumpist. We see the same downplaying of vaccine in public remarks by Dr Fauci:

White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday advised people who have been vaccinated for COVID-19 to hold off on congregating indoors to eat or drink.

. . . “No, it’s still not OK for the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamics of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” Fauci advised. “Like just yesterday, there were close to 80,000 new infections, and we’ve been hanging around 60,000, 70,000, 75,000.”

These people want a permanent crisis.

The Contrast Continues

The video above shows patrons at a Vancouver, BC restaurant urging health inspectors to leave when they attempted to close it due to what appears to have been a sudden, poorly communicated "red light-green light" closure of provincial indoor dining. Canada continues to experience lockdowns, curfews, and other extraordinary measures in response to a COVID surge that's returning case statisics to late 2020 levels.

In contrast, the US Supreme Court on Friday continued its recent orders confirming the natural right to freedom of worship, ruling that California may not prevent people from gathering in homes for Bible study and prayer meetings. Interestingly, the state argued that the court should not get involved, since improving COVID statistics would remove such restrictions within a week.

The court, clearly aware that last summer, Gov Newsom reversed an equivalent relaxation in another such red light-green light move, nevertheless went ahead and established the principle, issuing the restraining order the plaintiffs requested.

Canadian protests also continue in Montreal and Quebec City. especially in response to a reimposition of curfews in much of Quebec. Other protests occurred in Alberta, where authorities closed a church that violated orders to shut down. It's very puzzling that Canada is continuing to experience such a surge in cases with reimpositions of extremely strict controls that counterintuitively have had no perceptible effect on the disease. Meanwhile, the US is steadily relaxing controls, while vaccinations are showing positive results in nearly all regions. As discusssed in The Atlantic,

Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant with public-health directives, wearing masks, limiting social interactions, washing and sanitizing our hands ’til our fingertips prune. And what do we get? Per capita vaccination numbers lagging behind those of 50 other countries, including Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and much of Europe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s immunization tracker. The country currently has a level-four travel advisory: “Travelers should avoid all travel to Canada,” warns the CDC. In March, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the U.S.-Canada border—closed for nearly a year, since American COVID-19 infection rates began escalating out of control—would remain closed for at least another month.

The Atlantic piece suggests there's no single cause for the extremely slow rollout of vaccine in Canada:

Without much domestic manufacturing capacity to speak of, Canada had to sign advance-purchase deals with international vaccine companies. The country hedged its bet by mostly going with companies funded by Operation Warp Speed, and so far its strategy has been to overbuy doses in the hopes of securing enough to vaccinate all of its citizens. A mounting critique, however, is that perhaps Canada should have been more specific than “first quarter of 2021” in terms of arranging vaccine-delivery timing.

Bu whatever the reason, it's becoming plain that as of 2021, the single most visible and effective response to COVID is vaccine, and in the hands of capable public health authorities and policymakers, the turnaround in hard-hit US states like California has been spectacular. (This doesn't exclude other potential explanations for positive results in places like Texas and Sweden.) But in some important way, Canada and a few US states like Michigan have missed the boat, and the evidence is impossible to ignore that draconian lockdown-style controls and a red light-green light approach are utterly feckless measures that are actually counterproductive.

While the Atlantic piece says "Canadians have been overwhelmingly compliant", it's startmg to sound as though there are limits even to Canadian willingness to comply. Certainly a factor in what's beginning to look like US success in beating the combination of epidemic and moral panic has been the clear willingness of citizens to hold authorities electorally accountable, as well as the cooperation of the court system in clearly enforcing natural rights in the face of open-ended government efforts to curtail them in an "emergency".