Essential

Prevaricators! 

Fabricators!

Fabulists! 

Mythomaniacs!

All good words!

If it were children we are speaking about, we might call them “fibbers!”

But they can be applied to some American religious and political leaders – those claiming that churches, synagogues and mosques are “essential places that provide essential services.”

Political “pants on fire!!!!”

The survival of Judaism through centuries of persecution, the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, Kristallnacht and the Shoah puts the lie to today’s criers of “essential.” Concentration camps in contemporary China and Myanmar’s (Burma’s) moves to deprive Muslim citizens of their citizenship were anticipated by the Crusades (1095-1291) and the murders of 8,000 Muslim men and boys and efforts at ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (1995) and all testify to the lie of “essential.” 

If churches and attending Masses or worship services were “essential,” various forms of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism would never have survived Thomas More and Oliver Cromwell or Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots and her first cousin Elizabeth I, all of whom hunted down, tortured and executed laity and clergy alike and closed down and confiscated churches, convents, monasteries, and colleges - depending on the predominant theology of the institutions and the whims of the rulers of the moment.

Christianity arrived in China through the itinerant Nestorian/Assyrian monk Alopen in 635 c.e. (The sect originated in Asia Minor and Syria and was ultimately deemed a heresy by the Christian churches at the Council of Ephesus in 431 c.e. because it stressed the independence of the divine and human natures of Jesus). After fifteen centuries of persecution, approximately 400,000 adherents of Nestorianism live in today’s Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, the United States and Malabar, India.  

It’s critical to remember that European/Western Christianity – Roman Catholicism – arrived in China and Japan long before the Protestant Reformation, which began in1517, was fully underway. 

The first European Christian missioner – Italian Franciscan John of Montecorvino – began “the second evangelization” in the late 13th Century. Although Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians and Dominicans made brief appearances early in the 16th Century, it was Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Mateo Ricci – dressed as Buddhist monks and then Confucian scholars – who genuinely penetrated China late in the same century. In the early 18th Century, the Eurocentrism of subsequent missioners, resulted in the emperor’s decision to prohibit the preaching of Christianity and the deportation of missioners who did not follow the Chinese Rites banned by Rome.

In the mid-1800s religious liberty was, again, guaranteed to Christians and various expressions of Christianity began to expand into the interior. Spanning the change of centuries – 1899 to 1901, the Boxers – “the Righteous and Harmonious Fists” – waged an anti-imperialist, anti-foreign, and anti-Christian uprising that saw atrocities beyond description inflicted by European and American, Japanese and Chinese combatants, as well as the weakening of the Chinese dynastic system and its national defense capabilities, ultimately paving the way for half-a-century of internal conflict and the Sino-Japanese War.

Through the first half of the 20th Century, European and American Protestant and Catholic missioners continued to proselytize, open schools and hospitals, and develop indigenous Chinese clergy and religious communities - efforts that were ended by the Maoist/communist revolution of the late 1940s. Atheism was promoted as part of the Marxist ideology of the Community Party. While the revolution resulted in the expulsion of foreign missioners and the imprisonment and torture of religious, the Chinese constitution recognized Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity - each placed under the “guidance” of a “Patriotic” government agency. The result was that many Chinese Catholics affiliated with the so-called “underground” Church and Protestants developed “house churches” – refusing to register with the government and becoming vulnerable to punishment by the state. The Cultural Revolution saw an even more violent uptick in anti-religious ideologies and violence, followed by a tightly controlled return of religious tolerance in the 1980s that waxes and wanes in its intensity to the present day.

Nonetheless, Christianity continues as a very small but exceedingly vibrant reality in government controlled “above ground” and often persecuted “underground” and “house churches” that could never be considered “essential” to the living Faith.

Christianity arrived in Japan – already involved in a civil war - in 1549, when Jesuit missioner Francis Xavier accompanied Portuguese merchants; Spanish and Portuguese Catholic clergy quickly followed. The history of Catholic Christianity in Japan became an intricate cobweb of mercantile/religious nationalistic divisions among Europeans and internal power struggles among Japanese warlords.

 Amazingly, by the late 1500s, the Japanese mission had become the largest over seas Christian community not ruled by a European power. In 1587, the network of Jesuit/Christian political, mercantile, religious and regional powers resulted in “the Purge Directive Order to the Jesuits” by one of the vassals of the shogun and the deaths of the Martyrs of Nagasaki – six Franciscan missioners, three Japanese Jesuits and seventeen Japanese laymen including three young boys, all executed by crucifixion. 

Catholicism was formally banned in 1614 and the shogun demanded the expulsion of all European missioners and the execution of all converts in the mid-17th Century – ending the open practice of Christianity in Japan. The clergy and theological teaching and practice went underground until the return of Western missioners on the heels of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. 

Again, “Hidden Christians” – Kakure Kirishitans - kept the Faith – passing on prayers and the Bible as oral traditions and worshipping in secret rooms in private homes, relying on lay leaders to conduct services through persecution and martyrdoms and adapting their practices to their cultures and traditions. With the return of Christian missioners in the mid-1800s, Hanare Krishitan – “Separate Christians” – were reunited to the Catholic Church. 

It’s a particularly schizophrenic Roman Catholic theology that says the Eucharist and attending Mass is “essential,” but it is unacceptable to change a church law – established in 1139 and confirmed in 1563 - regarding celibacy so that the people of the Amazon and other priest-deserts don’t have to wait months for a priest to visit their communities and celebrate Mss. 

So, the next time you hear a politician, a minister, rabbi, imam, bishop or priest declare, in the midst of a pandemic that is still raging, opening houses of worship is “essential,” think “political pandering” or 

• Prevaricators! 

• Fabricators! 

• Fabulists! 

• Mythomaniacs!

• Fibbers!