The second is to engage in performative rituals that celebrate the mark in the name of a set of spiritually “charged” materials (e.g. ancestors, war heroes, great scholars, or simply the “sacred” earth that provides sustenance to the community), rituals designed to lift the citizen from the humdrum of his everyday existence and into a relationship with forces that transcend his standard, lifespan-delimited, sense of space and time. Indeed, in a video aimed at their respective flocks, a group of prominent Latin American bishops—playing into the hands of those promoting the sacramental nature of the vaccines similar to the way that certain Italian clerics imbued Mussolini’s materialist cult of the nation with transcendental airs—all but explicitly drew a line of continuity between the solidarity-inducing waves of love that radiate from the act of taking the Eucharist and those set in motion by the taking of the vaccine. Not to be outdone in this game of cynically commingling of the sacred and the pharmaceutically profane, Pope Francis chimed in with the following: “Getting Vaccinated with the vaccines authorized by the relevant authorities is an act of love, and helping to ensure that the majority of people do so is also an act of love, for oneself, for our families and our friends and for peoples…Getting vaccinated is a simple but profound way of promoting the common good and caring for one another, especially the most vulnerable.”
Author: Editor
Published at: 2025-11-15 20:02:00
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