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Repeat, the main player in the worldwide Covid drama unfolding all around us is Almighty God, no less. Of course He plays no part in the multitudinous sins involved, as sins, but it is He who created the universe and who sustains in existence what He created for every moment that it exists, without which it would collapse back into nothingness. And for what purpose did He create it? To populate His heaven with rational creatures, angelic or human, who will have made use of their God-given existence and free-will to choose, on God’s terms, to take up His offer of eternal bliss with Him in His heaven. And with a divine wisdom far above all human understanding, He so manages all life here on earth that every human soul reaching the age of reason has not only trials enough to make sure that it loves Him enough to deserve heaven, but also actual grace enough to make sure that it can get to heaven if it wants.

Therefore it is God who is ultimately directing what we can call this collapse of the West, just as He directed the Flood in the time of Noah, to punish sinful mankind, and to prevent it from populating hell instead of heaven. In fact the punishment was also a great mercy, because all mankind had “corrupted its ways” (Genesis VI, 11–12), so that no doubt a great mass of men were on their way to eternal damnation and succeeding – like today – in taking virtually everybody with them. Such had been the effect of original sin, over the approximately one thousand years since Adam and Eve. But as men progressively realised that the rising waters of the Flood were going to leave them no escape, so a minority of them will have profited by the waters’ slow rise to make an act of contrition sufficient to save their souls for eternity. Ask any of those souls, now in heaven, if the Flood was not a huge act of God’s mercy!

Similarly today. Mankind has corrupted its ways, all over the earth, with Western materialism, and worse than in Noah’s time, because this time the Incarnation has taken place, and after profiting from it for a while, this time men have spurned not only God but even the Incarnate God, visibly crucified for them, to endow them with a Church to help them to save their souls. Yet this time even His own churchmen have virtually spurned Him, ever since Vatican II. We are now 56 years on from the end of Vatican II, and the corruption is galloping forwards. Now, can anyone accuse God of having been in a hurry to strike, in the way He struck in 2020? Hardly. Or can anyone say He started to strike with a heavy hand? Hardly, when one thinks of the misfortunes like complete economic crashes or civil wars or famines announced for the years soon to come? And if and when these do come, by the malice of men and only by the permission of God, who will be able to say they were undeserved?

Yet God is patient with each single one of us, and His mercy endures for ever, only, He must strike and go on striking hard enough until we learn our lesson and even only begin to think again of getting to heaven. For with all too many of us the lesson, however hard, will be arriving too late, and will give rise only to curses, against Him, against our fellow-men, against life, against politicians, against anybody except the one person truly responsible for my own distress, and that will be – myself.

Therefore in everything that is coming I will see the (sinless) hand of God, and I will get on my knees to pray to Him to have mercy upon us poor sinners. Men can no longer clean up their mess, they can only make it worse. With the grace of God I will have compassion on them all, and I will do what I can do, to help them to save their souls, but from God alone will I expect true solutions. And He at least will have the wisdom and power to be directing all for the best, that much I know in advance.

Kyrie eleison.