This commentary is by longtime Vermont journalist Dave Gram, who has worked for The Associated Press and VTDigger, as a talk show host at WDEV radio, and as a columnist at Seven Days.
Rarely if ever has my brain felt so shell-shocked with cognitive dissonance as when I heard a Vermont Catholic priest describe himself as a patriot who would not follow his bishop’s directive that he be vaccinated against Covid-19 or wear a mask and submit to regular testing.
“Being more of the ilk of a patriot,” the Rev. Peter Williams said in a recent YouTube video, “I balk at any incursion into my rights as a human being and certainly a U.S. citizen.”
It looks from here like this pastor at churches in Springfield and Chester is 180 degrees wrong on what it means to be a patriot and what it means to be a Catholic or Christian. Both require enough humility to place oneself subordinate to the greater good, and Father Williams fails on both counts.
Let’s take patriotism first. There was a time when patriotism was defined as a willingness to sacrifice yourself — sometimes physically, sometimes merely your ego or personal preferences, for the good of your country. In two years, Covid-19 has taken about 840,000 American lives, twice as many as the 419,000 lost to the Axis powers in the four years of World War II. The coronavirus is easily the deadliest enemy the United States has ever faced.
Want a taste of real patriotism? Read or reread Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 classic “The Longest Day,” about the Allied invasion of Normandy. Today’s vaccine refusers complain of uncertainty about their long-term effects; now compare that with the uncertainty of the soldiers packed into small boats crossing the English Channel in the wee hours of June 6, 1944. They didn’t know if they were going to make it up the beach, but put those fears aside for the cause of defeating fascism. That was patriotism.
Now today’s self-described “patriots” can’t roll up their sleeves and grin and bear it when a nurse says, “This is going to pinch a bit.” Today’s “patriots” love to talk about honoring our men and women in uniform, but not enough to emulate their acceptance of a battery of vaccines on entering the service and more for many overseas deployments. They’ll honor all the heavy gear donned by a soldier — the body armor worn in 120-degree desert heat — but can’t bring themselves to put a piece of cloth over their nose and mouth.
I can’t begin to describe the disgust, so I’ll let the Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine do it for me: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman,” he wrote.
But for a former Catholic like me who has never quite gotten over his love for the church, Father Williams’ remarks cut even deeper.
One sign of a world turned upside down are the new definitions given to the words “sheep” and “goat.” A sheep, according to the online chatter of vaccine refusers, is someone who “obeys” the experts — the public health officials who are trying their best to use the science in which they are highly trained to guide us through this crisis.
Even weirder, the word “goat” now is an acronym for “greatest of all time,” and populates the headlines about Tom Brady every time he wins a Super Bowl. And sure enough, for many people today, whose primary concern is their own freedom and rights, they can look into a bathroom mirror — or a YouTube camera — and declare that, when it comes to “me being me,” they are the greatest of all time. All that is missing from this picture is some Christian humility.
There’s some literature with which Father Williams should be familiar that uses the terms “sheep” and “goats” differently from how they are used today.
In the famous parable in the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus uses the metaphor of a shepherd separating sheep from goats to signify His own sorting of the righteous from the sinner.
To the sheep, who would be saved, He said, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in …”
To the goats, He said, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in … “
Now picture a parish priest, giving Communion to an elderly, immunocompromised parishioner. The priest is neither vaccinated nor masked. He imparts to her the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and a few thousand particles of coronavirus.
It almost makes one want to add another line to the Scripture: “For I came to you deeply vulnerable, and you cared more for your own rights and freedoms, and your own twisted view of patriotism, than for my well-being.”
On second thought, that wasn’t cognitive dissonance that flooded my brain on first reading of Father Williams’ comments. It was shock and outrage.
