The peelers broke up a Good Friday service in south London, being held at Christ the King, a Polish Catholic Church.
It is sad to contemplate Britain today, especially given its glorious past as the birthplace of the English-speaking people, with their fabled history of liberty, starting with Magna Carta, and continuing with a civil war in the mid-17th Century in which parliament emerged victorious over the king, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the development of the common law, and the unprecedented rights and freedoms of Englishmen. The continued existence of Great Britain in its current condition is regrettable.
Meanwhile in Calgary, Canada, the coppers ran into a Polish churchman made of considerably stouter stuff. Artur Pawlowski was born in Kożuchów, Poland, in 1973, and immigrated to Canada in 1995, becoming a Canadian citizen in 2004. He has founded several street ministries in Calgary, and currently is the pastor of the King’s Glory Fellowship church.
Pawlowski has always been a very visible person, often at odds with the establishment. On April 28, 2012, the Progressive Group for Independent Business, of which former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a member, awarded Pawlowski the Free Speech Award for seven years of determined defense of Canadian constitutional rights and freedoms.
About a year ago, Pawlowski was fined $1,200.00 because his street ministry was feeding the homeless in a non-approved manner. He is currently litigating that fine.
On Good Friday, a female health inspector wearing jackboots and surrounded by five armed police officers, paid a visit to Pawlowski’s church. Pawlowski wasn’t the slightest bit interested in hearing her Covid spiel.
“Please get out. Get out of this property immediately! Get out!” “ I don’t want to hear a word.” “I don’t care what you have to say! Immediately out! Out! Out!” “Out of this property, you Nazis! Out! Gestapo is not allowed here!” “Do you understand English? Get out of the property!” “Come back when you have a warrant.”
Below is the feelgood video of the month:
Artur Pawlowski grew up under communism. He knows what communist tyranny looks like, and armed police officers barging into a church is exactly what it looks like. Generally, the Eastern Europeans have been much quicker to spot and call out the Left’s vicious power grab: using a respiratory illness with a 99.8% survival rate (as opposed to seasonal flu, which has a 99.9% survival rate) to destroy their political enemies: churches, small businesses, the self-supporting middle class and lower middle class.
Pawlowski has their number: “unbelievable sick, evil people. Intimidating people in a church during the Passover. You Gestapo Nazi communist fascists! . . . Can you imagine those psychopaths? Passover, the holiest Christian festival in a year, and they’re coming to intimidate Christians, during the holiest festival? Unbelievable!”
Canada seems to be producing courageous men of God; we recently ran a story on James Coates, an Edmonton pastor who was imprisoned for refusing to close his church. By contrast, America’s clergyman seem content to let creatures the likes of Gavin Newsom shut their churches down forever, or at least for enough years that their congregations are scattered to the winds and their membership craters. I don’t think their ministry was ever very important to them.
UPDATE: Here is Pastor Pawlowski being interviewed by Mark Steyn. In introducing the topic, Steyn notes that he showed the video the previous day, and that the intrusion was unlawful under Canada’s criminal code, section 176, which makes it an offense to:
1) obstruct or prevent an officiant from celebrating a religious or spiritual service,
2) wilfully disturb or interrupt an assemblage of persons met for religious worship, or
3) wilfully do anything that disturbs the order or solemnity of a religious or spiritual service.
Obviously, the Calgary constabulary are ignoring the rules of the realm.
Pastor Pawlowski talks about growing up under communism in Poland, and how Canada is drifting toward totalitarianism:
“I grew up under communist dictatorship behind the iron curtain, under the boot of the Soviets, and I’m telling you, that’s no fun at all . . . It was like a flashback, when those police officers showed up at my church, everything kind of came back to life from my childhood.”
“And the only thing I could do is to fend off the wolves as a shepherd . . . They were illegally encroaching on our rights during the most holy days, during the Passover celebration. . . I was a little bit shaken, but I did what every shepherd right now on the planet earth should be doing, fend[ing] off the wolves. We as lions should never bow before the hyenas, and that’s what they are right now.”
Steyn notes the totalitarian powers that state governors have seized under the increasingly absurd pretext of Covid control, and notes that too many people are meekly knuckling under to this naked power grab, and asks Pawlowski, “is it all beginning to look worryingly familiar to you, the way people accept it.”
“Yes it is,” replied Pawlowski. “I have been warning Canadians for the past 16 years that that is what is coming. I could smell it, I could see it at every corner. The implementation of what we are seeing now was started about 20 years ago. Growing up under communist dictatorship, that’s a disaster, that is hell on earth. And I see it already in our Western democracies. “
Here is Steyn’s original Monday evening piece on the incident: