COVID Amnesty for Bishops? by John M. Grondelski

As a student at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1990, I wrote a paper opposing then-Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s gruba kreska.  The “thick line” was a policy Poland’s first free Prime Minister pushed, deciding not to hold to account Communists, who for forty-five years had betrayed their country to the Soviets. He wanted, instead, to draw a “thick line” (gruba kreska) between the past and future.  I called it injustice, because it let off the totalitarians, big and small, from accounting to their victims for their deeds, while leaving those same perpetrators well-positioned to meddle in Poland’s future.

I recall that paper because The Atlantic’s Emily Oster recently argued for a gruba kreska, an “amnesty” for the architects of various COVID policies.  Rather than holding people to account for their decisions and consequences, Oster simply wants us to forget draconian COVID rules and “focus on the future.” …