This is a bad time to be a house of worship in the United States, as crazed people are vandalizing and damaging these places in record numbers.
For some time now, this blog has complained about the increasing trend in Catholic churches being vandalized across Europe –- and now here in the United States -– and the secular media barely noticing it.
Recently, Religion News Service picked up on the phenomenon of the wreckage happening to Catholic churches.
(RNS) — It was after a pair of Catholic churches caught ablaze last summer, one in Southern California and another in Florida, that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to start documenting and tracking vandalism at Catholic sites across the country.
The two fires occurred on the same morning: July 11, 2020. One destroyed the rooftop of the historic San Gabriel Mission — the fourth of a series of missions across California that Father Junipero Serra founded during the Spanish colonization era. The other ignited in Queen of Peace Catholic Church as parishioners prepared for Mass in Ocala, Florida.
Nobody was injured, but Aaron M. Weldon — of the USCCB’s Office of Religious Liberty — said the fires were “the impetus for us to start monitoring these sorts of events.”
Since then, the USCCB has tracked more than 105 incidents of vandalism of Catholic sites in the U.S., including arson, graffiti and defaced statues. The organization has logged news reports of such incidents dating back to May 2020, but it doesn’t yet have a detailed breakdown that categorizes the different kinds of vandalism.
May 2020 was the fateful month of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers and the start of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that saw a frenzy of property destruction around the country. (A year later, the Wall Street Journal noted last May, crime in Minneapolis is over the top.)
New FBI stats show the number of hate crimes (8,263) reported in fiscal year 2020 was the highest since 2001. Hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,244 offenses, and more than half (683) were antisemitic.
While only 73 were anti-Catholic hate crimes, that represents an annual increase since 2013. There were 64 anti-Catholic hate crimes reported in 2019, and 51 in 2018, according to the FBI data.
The story noted that the Catholic Church have been in the news lately for reasons for reasons ranging from Joe Biden’s presidency to whether pro-choice Catholic politicians should be barred from receiving Holy Communion.
However, Catholics were in the news far more in 2002, when the clergy abuse scandal burst into open, and churches weren’t getting vandalized at such rates at that time.
Other than the Wall Street Journal, other major media haven’t spotlighted this trend at all.
But they have talked about anti-Semitic incidents, which have been even worse. This New York Times piece in May talked about the trend. And it was a sobering piece, of course, and one wonders if the Times knew about it because so many of the incidents took place in the New York City metro area. A sample:
During the two weeks of clashes in Israel and Gaza this month, the Anti-Defamation League collected 222 reports of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and violence in the United States, compared with 127 over the previous two weeks…
The A.D.L. has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in the country since 1979, and its past three annual reports have included two of its highest tallies. The organization recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment last year, a 10 percent increase from the previous year.
That’s a lot. CNN, BBC and Forbes did pieces on attacks on Jewish sites. As for Muslims, ABC News did a piece on attacks on Islamic facilities.
That’s valid and important coverage, of course. But why haven’t these same media noted the wave of similar incidents among Catholic churches?
When news of hundreds of unmarked graves near residential schools in western Canada to which the government sent Indian children from 1883 to 1996 came out this summer, Catholic churches in the U.S.A. — which had no relation to what happened in Canada — were attacked. Who reported on it? The Washington Times for one. One interesting observation:
At a time when the focus on hate crimes against racial, ethnic and religious groups has never been higher, conservative Catholic leaders are frustrated by what they describe as a lack of national media and political attention to the alarming surge in anti-church attacks.
Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, chalked up the disconnect in large part to the church’s well-known opposition to abortion, a stance at odds with the Democratic Party and liberal movement, as well as many media figures.
“Can you imagine if the type and number of attacks we’ve seen against Catholics occurred against mosques or Jewish places of worship?” he asked. “The response would be overwhelming, and yet there’s practically silence, in part because the media does the bidding of the pro-abortion movement.”
Burch might be on to something.
So is the New York Post which, in an opinion piece by a Canadian writer, explained that Canadians have known about such sites for decades. Yet, major U.S. media ran with a story that was actually old news. This resulted in headlines that, in their own way, were fake news.
So this year’s “discoveries” are better called “confirmations.” As Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde declared, “While it is not new to find graves at former residential schools in Canada, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.”
Yet the US press treated the news as if Canada had been hiding genocidal death camps.
“Discovery of Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Prompts Grief and Questions” ran a Washington Post headline. “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” was The New York Times’ headline.
Those headlines were false — according to all three chiefs who made the discoveries. “This is not a mass grave site, this is just unmarked graves,” Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme said of the biggest site.
However, the damage was done. In one day alone in Calgary, 10 Catholic churches were set on fire, some burned to the ground.
The Catholic media, of course, have been on this. Aleteia had this report last month and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has this backgrounder and this page listing media coverage (since May 2020) of vandalism, arson and other attacks, the latest being Nov. 1 in Fargo, N.D.
Which makes one really wonder. I can see New York, Los Angeles or Miami being hot spots. But Fargo?
The coronavirus pandemic is no doubt the top reason for why our society has been going off the rails, but other things: simmering racial injustices, enduring hatred for former President Donald Trump from the left; anger over vaccine mandates, the new anti-abortion law in Texas, are pushing limits and causing a poisonous public square similar to pre-World War II Germany.
If Catholics want better media coverage of the attacks on their property, it’s time for bishops to take off the gloves and be far more public about what’s going on. I’m not seeing many of them do so, perhaps in an effort to not look like complainers. Are they even discussing these attacks at their annual meeting set for next week?
The time for politeness and subtlety is over. Say nothing or downplay it and the problem will only get worse.
Or take a leaf from Jewish leaders and beef up the security cameras, install gates around the main campus and employ more off-duty police. The latter are becoming more of a thing; I was visiting an Assembly of God church on Seattle’s Eastside recently and who should be standing in the main reception area but two uniformed officers?
I’d like to think that attacks on churches and synagogues are just a reflection of COVID-19 madness, but something seems loose in our society whereby houses of worship are just the first line of attack in the bubbling rage out there. It takes discernment from those in the media world to see what’s going on and call it out –- or at least report on the symptoms, hoping that someone somewhere can tie it together and explain to the rest of us what is going on.
FIRST IMAGE: Illustration from the Archdiocese of Denver web site.