“There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church,” the late, great Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen stated in 1938. “There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.” In thus noting, perhaps Sheen was thinking of how the Crusades are cast as imperialistic campaigns when they were more like defensive actions designed to ward off Muslim aggression; or maybe how WWII-era pontiff Pius XII was portrayed as “Hitler’s Pope,” though we now know this is an illusion effected via Soviet agitprop. Or maybe the prelate was pondering 100 other things, from the historical to the theological. 

But now there’s one more, too: The mainstream-media-enabled allegation that “residential” schools in Canada — run by the Catholic Church in most cases and Protestants in some — seized American Indian children from their families, brutalized them, and then essentially authored their deaths before burying them in unmarked mass graves. “These government-funded boarding schools were part of a policy to attempt to assimilate indigenous children and destroy indigenous cultures and languages,” reported BBC News July 15. The outlet provocatively calls a now-adult former student it quotes a “residential school survivor,” knowing, perhaps, that what’s assumed is learned best. 

With the above and recent talk of the “discovery” of “215 unmarked Indian mass graves” at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, it amounts to a seemingly damning story that could inspire damnable behavior, and so it has come to pass. At least 50 Canadian houses of worship — mainly churches, Catholic and otherwise — some of which serve immigrant and American Indian communities, ironically, have been vandalized or wholly burned down. Meanwhile, some public figures’ reactions have ranged from indifference to tacit approval to blatant encouragement. The head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Harsha Walia, responded to the arson on July 4 with, “Burn it all down.” Nesta Matthews, a talk-show host in St. John, New Brunswick, went further, tweeting June 30, “Burn the churches down. Arrest any former staff that were actually there & any current staff that won’t provide documentation. Sell everything they own in Canada and give it to survivors. Dismantle it completely.” 

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