Friday’s article asked what freedom the people who imposed COVID tyranny are willing to surrender in order to repair what they helped destroy, not necessarily just for others, but more importantly, to satisfy divine justice.

Beneath that unpaid debt, though, lies an older question that American politics and culture seldom permit—

The purpose for which freedom is given.

The most common answer for freedom during COVID involved bodily autonomy, and those who argued for it and those who argued for grandma’s body instead. That argument was necessary on one level, especially when governments, employers, and public personalities were demanding submission to a medical intervention under the threat of lost livelihoods and exclusion from ordinary life. People were literally held in contempt.

The Fauci non-testimony and stories like Stephen A Smith’s quasi-confession prove that that level was indeed important, one that many a courageous soul has found vindication in just over the last several days.

It is the Old Church, however, that takes the argument beyond ownership of the body and to the level where the conversation needs to move.

As Shawn Ryan recently said on The Tucker Carlson Show, supplying the material for today’s Quote of the Day on The Hayride, “God needs to be highlighted… You just can’t put faith in man at all.”

Freedom and the Popes

Pope Leo XIII taught in Libertas that liberty is legitimate insofar as it gives man “greater facility for doing good, but no farther.” Freedom, therefore, is ordered toward truth. A man left alone by the state may still be enslaved to pleasures, money, public approval, or lies—even the lies associated with those well-meaning souls who nonetheless remained planted in a lower level of analysis, counsel, or commentary.

This is very important—of eternal importance—as we churn toward 2030 and certain possibilities with an “Agenda” perhaps much worse than the ruse pulled on us in 2020. It really cannot be about Republican vs Democrat only, and time is running out to understand that.

Old Catholic liberty before Modernism got its hands on it reaches beyond freedom from the State, finding its proper end in freedom in Christ. Do remember that Francis and the Vatican were in bed with the vaxxers all along.

Even though it’s too far afield today, don’t forget the hope a growing number of people have in Catholic law and one “Hildebrand.” Just keep it in mind….

“You are bought with a price,” Saint Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “Be not made the bondslaves of men” (7.23). This anticipates the Ryan quotation above. It is this spirit that gave the resistance of Novak Djokovic, Kyrie Irving—spotlighted on Friday—and millions of resolute Everymen its power. They accepted tangible losses rather than violate their own consciences, and in many cases, the said freedom under God. We don’t have to canonize every conclusion they reached to recognize the impact of their choices, and certainly we should not accept ad hominem attacks to somehow discredit them. I don’t care about the NBA any more than most readers here do, no, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value and virtue to cull here.

Their freedom became visible and it cost them something—which makes people like me and a lot of you want to stand up too, simply based on solidarity.

Neither the ruler nor the citizen exists outside God’s moral law. When the State treats its own judgment as the highest court of truth—which echoes those lower “levels” of conversation we keep highlighting—the individual conscience survives only until some other person in government power decides that obedience to something as insidious as what happened during COVID serves “the common good.”

And remember, it isn’t that the common good isn’t what the Old Catholic way once taught; it’s that the enemy has taken that right and just teaching and warped it into a brotherhood and solidarity without Christ as the anchor.

The popes were warning about the foundation of this error long before COVID, and whether you, good reader, are Catholic or not, it is important to know that, to know that there have been religious leaders in the past who have not just gone along to get along, as difficult and political as the papacy has always been to balance. Pius IX condemned the proposition that Church and State ought to be separated. Leo XIII warned in Longinqua that it would be “very erroneous” to consider the American arrangement the most desirable condition for the Church. Pius X called separation in Vehementer Nos “a most pernicious error.”

These are all popes we’ve explored along these very lines in previous work, and we invite you to a search for them in the archives. The ecosystem we are building is what is of utmost importance—not the latest hot take on each political or cultural issue.

When the COVID crisis tore down the door to our lives, the allegedly neutral State generated a moral vocabulary all its own. Compliance was recast as virtue—love of neighbor—while skepticism became selfishness—an appearance that seemed to run counter to Christ’s Gospel. The ostracizing of such citizens was administered as responsibility and for the good of all. Even churchmen repeated these judgments, including those in the Vatican, permitting man-made, state-governed policy to define the duties of a well-formed conscience and soul.

Is it any wonder that we have almost entirely lost the understanding that the Church is supernatural, when its supposed shepherds don’t teach like those of the past anymore?

Gospel for the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

Yesterday’s Gospel supplies a salutary restraint upon anyone making such a judgment on a person of God. In Christ’s parable, the Pharisee’s fasting and tithing were genuine good works. Yet he converted them, in his own mind, into evidence of his own superiority, using another man’s sin to flatter himself while neglecting to ask pardon for offenses he may not even have recognized. It’s an extension of the wooden beam/splinter in the eye story elsewhere. The Publican, on the other hand, sinner as he was, approached God without self-exculpation, depending entirely upon divine mercy.

This is why I drop a confession of my own into these pieces that involve other men, even if their name is Stephen A Smith. That confession places me inside the judgment I am making, acknowledging that sound discernment cannot exculpate the sinner—even one named “me”—exercising it. Because even truth itself can be defended with a most revolting form of vanity (remember how the enemy can use anything good), I have to ask for mercy while warning about error, refusing the Pharisee’s illusion that another man’s blindness proves my sight.

I must do that as a Catholic, especially a public one.

Catholics must therefore judge every State or public command under Christ while refusing to mistake correct judgment for personal sanctity, personal prophecy, or personal perfection. The obligation to resist illegitimate authority remains, sure, but so does the obligation to strike our own breasts—for we too have been wrong, and many times over.

It’s a balance, isn’t it? And that balance is yet another reason to take Shawn Ryan’s message seriously today—God needs to be highlighted… You just can’t put faith in man at all.

Not even—not fully—our own insight and wisdom, and sound as it may be on some levels.

Final Thoughts

With that clarity, the rest has a proper and fair context. Freedom under Christ is neither self-worship nor submission to the State, but the lived recognition that man answers first to God and only secondarily to human authority. It allows resistance without pride and obedience without idolatry, refusing both the arrogance of the self-anointed dissenter and the false sanctity of State law or media virtue signaling. That is precisely the balance America has spent decades destroying, a destruction the COVID regime vividly illustrated. “Public health” became a god unto itself, replacing both the rightful King and the moral accountability associated with Christian discernment, not to mention a healthy test of our faith in God vs our faith in man.

That is why the question cannot remain merely, What did they do to us? It must become, What is our freedom for now? If we use it only to regain our physical comforts, continue the unsustainable political binaries, and await our marching orders from the next approved authority on our side, then COVID taught us very little, and such a failure to learn becomes incredibly embarrassing for us.

If our freedom is ordered toward Christ, however, it equips us to scrutinize—to discern—the next command we get, accept the possible cost of refusing it, and remember where our faith must rest if we must choose between God and man.

Shawn Ryan was right—“God needs to be highlighted.” For unless He is, the regime will soon once again present shameful obedience as love—and permission from man as the only freedom worth having.

Thank you for reading The Hayride!