Burning question that. To wear or not to wear? Science has the answer. Oh? Yes and no, says this writer in City Journal. Surely, the idea got off to a rocky start:

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted then–surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”

Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”

Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.”

About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients’ wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials’ advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding.

Then something (must have) happened. On April 3 of that very same year, the same Jerome Adams said the CDC was changing its guidance . . . the general public should . . . wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.”

A dizzying round, wouldn’t you say? It got dizzier, as we know:

Sen. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work.” Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance . . . are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status.

The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.

It’s not easy being a CDC.

more coming . . .

In the document, “a shockingly draconian exercise of papal authority, one that strikes at the heart of the spiritual life for millions of Catholics . . . the pope is seeking to exclude from parish churches – and ultimately to eliminate – a liturgical usage that has defined the religious culture of Catholics for centuries, a tradition stretching back in an organic continuum to the earliest days of the Church.”

If Pope Benedict’s own motu proprio Summorum pontificum is to be taken seriously, the legal validity of such a move would seem be inadmissible, and many bishops appear to be dumbfounded by its implications.

What’s more . . .

. . . this strange document, so filled with contradictions and unanswered questions, is no less shocking for its self-defeating nature. It appears to be designed to achieve precisely the opposite of its stated goals, principally the defense of the Second Vatican Council.

It seems that after so many years of suspicion regarding Pope Francis’ ultimate agenda, he has finally shown his hand, and his hand is nothing less than a souped-up version of the “hermeneutic of rupture” that unleashed chaos in the Church during the 1960s and 70s, and has continued to undermine the credibility of Vatican II since the council’s completion in 1965.

In effect, he embraces the post-council revolution.

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger (emeritus Benedict XVI) in 1988 identified this revoltion, citing “a mentality of narrow views that isolate Vatican II,” he told the bishops of Chile. “There are many accounts of it which give the impression that, from Vatican II onward, everything has been changed, and that what preceded it has no value or, at best, has value only in the light of Vatican II.”

Indeed, the gauntlet has been thrown.

more more more here. . .

He wants them to change their position about allowing for reasons of conscience in people’s deciding whether to be vaccinated.

Amid disagreement among Catholic leaders over whether there is a moral obligation to receive a coronavirus vaccine, board members at the National Catholic Bioethics Center have told CNA that Blase Cardinal Cupich has urged that the center retract its guidance against mandated immunization.

One board member told CNA that Cardinal Cupich has been “leaning hard” on the bishops and some prominent lay board members, but did not elaborate on specific names.The NCBC board members spoke with CNA on the condition they not be identified by name.
The Archdiocese of Chicago did not respond to CNA’s request for comment.

The board members who spoke with CNA said that they would oppose the change they say the cardinal is seeking.

“I think everyone should be vaccinated,” said one of them, “and Catholics should be the first to give a good example. . . . but the conscience of religious people should be respected.”

Cupich has been applying “tremendous pressure” on the board “to retract its support for conscience or religious exemptions from coronavirus vaccine mandates,” wanting them “to argue in favor of such mandates.”

The NCBC, a bioethics think tank, has as its mission “to provide education, guidance, and resources to the Church and society to uphold the dignity of the human person in health care and biomedical research.” Its board, which includes bishops, a deacon, and lay persons, is chaired by Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans.

Right here on your own digital device . . .

It’s something this scholar wrote about in 2015. . .

I do not think that the implications of his abdication have yet been fully recognised. Not since the Council of Constance had a living pope receded from the See of Rome. In 1415, the Council deposed the ‘Pisan’ pope John XXIII, and then accepted the resignation of the ‘Roman’ pope Gregory XII on 4 July. In 1417 it deposed the ‘Avignon’ pope Clement VIII, and elected Martin V.

[Until 2013] No subsequent pope has abdicated or been deposed. Since then, the assumption that the pope is a Given whom only God can loose from his pontificate, has, surely, been one of the most potent protections of each succeeding pontiff.

After Benedict’s abdication, nothing can ever be the same again. No future pope can ever be as immovable as every pope was from Constance until Benedict. . . .

Having offered samples of custom or episode in English history, in education and politics:

Eventually, this will sink in. Eventually, popes will become as disposable as head masters and Mrs Thatcher.

And this implies a consequential loss of power; a vulnerability.

He muses on it in 2021:

I wonder if (I wouldn’t put it past him) Pope Benedict XVI realised all this.

I wonder if his abdication was his last and most masterly coup to undermine the post-Vatican II construct, against which he had so vigorously argued, of the Pope Who Can Do Anything, who is an Absolute Monarch; and to restore the Vatican I model of a strictly limited papacy with its limitations clearly and lucidly described.

His resignation, in other words, spelled the death of The Dictator, or dictatorial, Pope?