Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Anti-Christian Hysteria Has Grown Into Church-Burning Terror, And People Might Be Next
The Federalist ^ | July 13, 2021 | Christopher Bedford

Posted on 07/13/2021 8:10:05 AM PDT by Kaslin

Anti-Christian terrorists have turned their rage on poor First Nation and Canadian communities, accused us all of blood debt, and decided they will burn our sacred buildings to the ground.


St. Ann’s Catholic Church was a small church built to serve a small town, but that humble building was a mighty testament to the people who built and nourished it.

The people of Chuchuwayha Indian Reserve Number Two traveled more than 40 miles, each way, by horse and wagon, to pick up the lumber they used to build their small church, by hand, outside the town of Hedley, British Columbia. That church stood for more than a century, providing spiritual nourishment to its small congregation at the far-flung edge of the world.

But now, St. Ann’s is gone. On June 26, it burned until nothing was left but a smoldering pile of ash. It wasn’t lightning or a tragic accident. It was arson — and it wasn’t an isolated incident.

All over Canada, churches are going up in flames. On the same day 25 miles south, Our Lady of Lourdes parish was burned to the ground as well. The week before that, St. Gregory’s Church near Osoyoos was destroyed. So was Sacred Heart near Penticton.

All three were also more than a century old, historic, beautiful houses of worship, destroyed in a day out of hatred. Sacred Heart parishioners gathered to watch their doomed church burn. When the church bell finally fell to the ground with a single gong, some of them sobbed.

St. Jean Baptiste in Morinville, Alberta was burned to the ground. Another arson. At Holy Rosary church in Edmonton, a statue of St. John Paul II was vandalized with red paint.

All these are Catholic, but they aren’t the only ones being targeted. In Calgary, 10 churches of various denominations were vandalized in a single night. A few days later, a Vietnamese church was set on fire — just hours after it held its first full service in more than a year.

Overall more than two dozen churches in Canada have been targeted over the past few weeks — and people are cheering it on. Not just anonymous people, either: On June 30, Harsha Walia, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, responded to a story of another church arson, saying “Burn it all down.”

Others rallied to her defense. Naomi Sayers, a lawyer and blue Twitter checkmark, said “I would help her burn it all down … and also, I would help anyone charged with arson if they actually did burn things.”

What’s going on? You might have heard a little bit about it. From the 1870s up through the 1990s, the Canadian government funded institutions called residential schools. We had similar institutions here in the United States. These were boarding schools created to educate American Indian children, and the explicit goal was to assimilate them to European ways.

Today, we can understand where these schools went astray. They took children away from their parents and communities. Without family to look out for them, some children were exposed to physical or sexual abuse. Thanks to insufficient government funding, schools were often overcrowded and students were underfed, making the schools unhealthy.

But an honest discussion of that tragedy is not what some people want: What they want to see is genocide, because then they can hate — and feel justified for doing so.

“Let’s call this for what it is,” Chief Jason Louie, a tribal chief of the Lower Kootenay Band, told the Canadian Broadcasting Channel. “It’s a mass murder of indigenous people. The Nazis were held accountable for their war crimes. I see no difference in locating the priests and nuns and the brothers who are responsible for this mass murder to be held accountable for their part in this attempt of genocide of an indigenous people.”

The vast majority of the priests, nuns, and ministers who built these schools and ran them for a century did so with noble and self-sacrificing intent. Now, they are smeared like they were running death camp experiments, and this ridiculous narrative has been deliberately egged on by the press and even the government.

“Officers are investigating vandalism at 10 churches,” the Calgary Police tweeted. “We must never forget residential schools are a part of our legacy that destroyed the lives of so many Indigenous families. But vandalism like this only creates further division, fear and destruction.”

If you’ve never heard the Ku Klux Klan’s heinous church-burning campaign described as “vandalism,” that’s because no one with a heart or a brain would do so. In Canada, it seems, neither honesty nor decency extends to Christians. And don’t forget — the Christians brought this on themselves.

While British Columbia Premier Jason Kenney decried the arsons as “as attack on Canadian values” and “cowardly,” and pledged money to protect Christians, Prime Minister Jason Trudeau took a different tack.

“I can’t help but think,” Trudeau mused, “that burning down churches is actually depriving people who are in need of grieving and healing and mourning from places where they can grieve and reflect and look for support.”

“I can’t help but think,” he might well have said instead, “that burning down churches is bad. Sorry guys, the problem isn’t you — it’s me.”

Even as churches burn down around him, Trudeau is singling out not the arsonists, but Pope Francis. He’s demanding that the pope travel to Canada to deliver an apology for the residential school system.

It didn’t matter to Trudeau that it was a school system created not by the church, but by Canada’s government — and that he had promised to take care of the cemeteries five years ago. Nor did it matter that Pope Benedict XVI had hosted a delegation of First Nations Indians at the Vatican seven years before that, where he apologized for the church’s role in the government’s plan. Or that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper had apologized 10 months before then, nor even that the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate had beat them all to it by nearly 20 years.

But we’re in the midst of a full-blown moral frenzy. Even before reading long publicly available apologies and reports, an ounce of sense or credulity should have cast doubt on the sudden hysteria based on the notion that Catholic priests moved to the far-flung wilderness, fed, taught, clothed, and catechized Indian children, and then, for no reason, took the children aside and murdered them.

Consider, for instance, the “discovery” of 182 unmarked graves near St. Eugene’s Mission School outside Cranbrook. These unmarked graves aren’t hidden — they’re literally in a cemetery — and they’re not a mass grave, but individualized. They haven’t even found out if the graves contain children or adults; the cemetery was simply used by the entire community. The reason the graves are “unmarked” is that the wooden crosses used to mark them and the fence that kept them safe decayed. In other words, people have found that an old cemetery contained bodies.

It’s the same story at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, where 751 graves were found. According to Chief Cadmus Delorme, these were all individual graves, they probably once had markers, and the cemetery almost certainly includes adults who lived in the area as well. But for those who would hate the church regardless, small-town cemeteries in impoverished rural areas are warped into mass graves.

All of this was carefully detailed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report released six years ago. So what’s the real story of the residential schools? No matter what, it’s not a fun one. Canadian government policy at the time was clear: The goal was to assimilate the First Nations into the rest of Canadian society. That meant training them in agriculture and Western trades. It meant dressing them in Western clothing and teaching them English.

When European settlers arrived in modern British Columbia, the tribes who lived there still practiced chattel slavery — something their woke champions might be surprised to learn. Sometimes, at their potlatch gatherings, great chiefs murdered slaves to show their wealth. In at least a handful of places, ritual cannibalism was an occasional practice.

The above does not justify what the Canadian government did, but it explains their thinking. They were faced with primitive and alien societies, some of which still followed horrifying practices. More than once, European settlers of the Americas handled tribes by practically exterminating them. In Canada, their solution was to assimilate them.

Once in place, the churches agreed to take the children for the government and educate them. That was a common role of clergy, especially on the frontiers. According to the Truth and Reconciliation report, the government refused to pay for children who died to be transported back to their parents, despite requests from the churches, and so they were buried there.

The government also refused to pay for headstones, so with limited resources, the churches erected wooden markers and fencing. Those, as those above, eventually rotted, or in some cases were lost in fires.

When the schools closed, the departing clergy asked the government to please care for the cemeteries so they didn’t fall victim to the weather and the cattle and everything else that degrades cemeteries, but while acknowledging the need, they didn’t do it. Nor did Trudeau ever make good on the promise he made to care for them after the report’s release.

Everything about that is horrible, even if it seems bungling-if-well-intentioned stupidity and negligence are more to blame than darkest evil. Overall, an estimated 150,000 First Nations children passed through residential schools. About 3,200 of them died, a little more than 2 percent.

That’s “died,” not “were murdered”: The first of these schools opened in 1867 and they peaked prior to the Second World War, a time before antibiotics, and according to the report the main cause of death was tuberculosis. Behind that, there was influenza, yellow fever, and typhoid — the same diseases that were plaguing and killing children all across Canada.

But because of poor medical care and poor and crowded living conditions — all caused by extremely limited church resources and a government unwilling to help them in the job they’d assigned — First Nations children died at a rate of two to four times that of their peers who weren’t in these schools.

There’s no getting around that sad history, but history is not what this is about. The terrorists don’t care about it, and the government doesn’t want to talk about it either. They have literally found a cemetery, said there are bodies in it, and decided “genocide.” There were no Nazi death camps — these are once-marked victims of a government education system and the harsh realities of disease.

And where is the government anyways? Where are the “Hug a Catholic” posters or the “Hate Is Not Welcome Here” stickers? Where are the TV ads and the speeches calling out and condemning these barbarous attacks on the innocent faithful?

Anti-Christian terrorists have turned their rage on poor First Nation and Canadian communities, accused us all of blood debt, and decided that they will burn our sacred buildings to the ground. It’s explicit, and the government responsible for both the program then, and defense of its citizens now, sits and watches.

Over the past few years, across the West anti-Christian rhetoric has been tolerated, spread, and spoken in the highest stations of power. Emboldened, anti-Christian hate crimes rose across Europe and the United States, from Boston to San Francisco, and from Youngstown to El Paso. Now, even when a widespread campaign burns churches to the ground in Canada over conspiracies, exaggerations, and slanders, too many of our leaders stand idly by murmuring awkward nothings.

Can there be any doubt people will come next? If you don’t believe in the devil, you should.


TOPICS: Canada; Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: antichristian; britishcolumbia; canada; firstnations; justintrudeau; klantifa; leftistbigots; popebenedictxvi; popefrancis; romancathchurch
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-68 next last
To: Kaslin

This brief article provided more facts about the history of the school system, the nature of the graves, and the probable causes of most of the deaths than all the MSM coverage combined.


21 posted on 07/13/2021 9:09:36 AM PDT by Steve_Seattle
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Be a shame if some night time ambushes got set to catch the terrorists walking up with gasoline.


22 posted on 07/13/2021 9:11:54 AM PDT by DesertRhino (A coup government may not claim the protection of the same constitution it overthrew. )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: wbarmy
"May God find me among the wheat, cause I don’t need to building to be with my brothers and sisters in Christ."

Last time I checked, most evangelical Protestants hold their services inside a building. Yes, you can pray anywhere, but communal worship is a standard feature of all forms of Christianity and all religions. Even non-liturgical groups like the Quakers have churches or meeting halls. In fact, they're building one about a block from my house.
23 posted on 07/13/2021 9:16:45 AM PDT by Steve_Seattle
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: Kevmo

It was 150 years ago, and they were trying to bring Indians living in poverty up to the modern. They were not feeling racist, they were feeling like they were human and deserved the opportunity to participate in the modern world.
Like the Spanish conquistadors, the workers at the schools were heroes doing a difficult job.

When the Vikings landed in Nova Scotia, they name they Indians “scraelings” which meant wretches.


24 posted on 07/13/2021 9:19:31 AM PDT by DesertRhino (A coup government may not claim the protection of the same constitution it overthrew. )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: DesertRhino; Jaysin

He was talking about what took place over 2000 years in Europe, not so narrowly focused on 150 years ago in Canada.


25 posted on 07/13/2021 9:35:21 AM PDT by Kevmo (some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. ~Jonathan Karl)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: conservativehistorian

I’ve tracked church burnings since last December. There have been 42 church arson fires this year in the US. Not all were burned to the ground.


26 posted on 07/13/2021 9:35:37 AM PDT by aimhigh (THIS is His commandment . . . . 1 John 3:23)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
The article adds a great deal of clarity to the claim that these children were buried in "mass graves," which suggests some sort of murderous rampage by the administrators of the schools. But the facts are:

1. These were not mass graves, but individual graves whose wooden markers had rotted over time. In other words, we are basically talking about cemeteries, and we do not call cemeteries "mass graves" just because there are a lot of graves in a confined area.

2. There were probably many adults among those buried.

3. For most of their history, these schools operated in an era of relatively primitive medicine, with no vaccines or modern antibiotics. Infant mortality and child morality rates were much higher then than now, and diseases like tuberculosis and the flu - including the Spanish flu - took a heavy toll. (My father lost a brother to the Spanish flu; my younger sister had a congenital intestinal disorder and probably would have died if she had been born fifty years earlier.)

Were there abuses? No doubt, but nothing at all like the scenarios of mass murder - the Nazi analogies - that are being uncritically presented in the mainstream media.
27 posted on 07/13/2021 9:37:28 AM PDT by Steve_Seattle
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: DesertRhino

The Vikings were not upholding christian principles when they first encountered the Inuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling


28 posted on 07/13/2021 9:39:57 AM PDT by Kevmo (some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. ~Jonathan Karl)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: Jan_Sobieski

Well, ammo supplies are indeed up and prices are down.

Might as well take advantage of it.


29 posted on 07/13/2021 10:34:34 AM PDT by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith……)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Steve_Seattle

And you are lacking in some basic history. Yes, most do have services in buildings, but they also have services in tents at different times of the years.

And all of these churches came from denominations which were famous for camp meetings, evangelical events and etc. Outdoor revival meetings were famous around the turn of the century. Additionally, when churches were shut down by local bureaucrats, the church4es would hold outdoor meetings near the jail or sheriff’s office.

A building does not make a church, Christ died for the people. We can worship as a group anywhere (sunrise Easter services on hilltops), the building just keeps us dry during the rain.


30 posted on 07/13/2021 10:35:16 AM PDT by wbarmy (I chose to be a sheepdog once I saw what happens to the sheep.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

It’s just an excuse. There were members of the Anti-Canada left who were just looking for a justification for destroying churches. They use the pseudo-excuse of the boarding schools.

trudeau deliberately and intentionally ignored the burnings of the churches.

The left is the same in Canada as in the USA, but I think Canada is closer to its final demise because the people have been well trained by their government to be sheep. If they dump trudeau for what they would call a “conservative” (someone to the right of Bill Clinton, by their standards) they’ll be OK. If they give the pretty-face marxist another term in office, it’s over for Canada.


31 posted on 07/13/2021 10:38:59 AM PDT by I want the USA back (To find out who really rules you, find out who you're not allowed to criticize. Voltaire. )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Prayers for all the parishioners of these burned down and vandalized churches.

May God grant them courage and strength to move forward with rebuilding their Churches.


32 posted on 07/13/2021 10:53:30 AM PDT by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: wbarmy

I am very aware of outdoor revival meetings, but they probably constitute about one one-thousandth of religious services - if that - even in the South. And those events are very dependent upon the weather, and would be impractical for much of the year in many climates. And I’m not sure why holding a service in a tent magically makes it more religious or more authentic.


33 posted on 07/13/2021 10:55:03 AM PDT by Steve_Seattle
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 30 | View Replies]

To: All

It’s not just the far left who are hostile to the Christian faith, there are lots of atheists around who talk in terms of people of faith being “a big problem” and how it will be good when we are all gone (I think they mean through natural attrition as most of us are older). These are not wild-eyed Trots toked up on weed but your ordinary middle class Canadians who vote Liberal because their god already came down to earth.


34 posted on 07/13/2021 10:55:59 AM PDT by Peter ODonnell (Pray for health, economic recovery, and justice.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies]

To: All

I think the wild-eyed leftists I mentioned are mostly voting for other parties than the Liberals too, just to be clear, they probably vote NDP or Green, or even for their own kind (the Marxist-Leninist and Communist parties of Canada are not banned from elections and can get as many as two or three hundred votes in some urban ridings). I did an experiment once where I registered as an independent and then didn’t campaign, just to find out how many votes a complete outsider would get presumably from mistakes made at the voting booth, or a name choice at random. My vote total was 44, however, I had attended one all-candidates meeting at the university in town and if I subtracted my votes at that polling station, my total was eight. So from that I concluded that an independent with no platform or name recognition would get a very small number of votes at random. So getting back to the 200-300 vote totals for communists, that seems to indicate the presence of that many communist sympathizers in any given urban population of about 100,000 (that being the average size of a federal riding in Canada). Back in the day Winnipeg was known as a hotbed of radicalism and elected communists to parliament between the world wars.

Entire change of subject, but one wonders what the Indians called the Vikings. Maybe blow-ins? Or would that only be the Irish?


35 posted on 07/13/2021 11:03:15 AM PDT by Peter ODonnell (Pray for health, economic recovery, and justice.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 34 | View Replies]

To: Steve_Seattle

Who said anything about more religious or more authentic???

The point is that God doesn’t care if we are in a building or not, He cares that we do not break fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

The Russian Christians held services in the depths of the forests, so that the KGB couldn’t find them. Others have held services in caves, on ships, under bough and on hilltops. The building is not important and Canadians burning of the buildings will not stop one Real Christian from the “gathering together” for worship.


36 posted on 07/13/2021 11:15:11 AM PDT by wbarmy (I chose to be a sheepdog once I saw what happens to the sheep.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 33 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Sin repeats itself via the ignorant. If the Church taught Christianity better, I say as a Catholic, we would be supported by the masses in the streets and the bishops would be spitting facts transparently and courageously...but we didn’t teach well enough and our bishops are cover-yourself cowards, so burning will increase in ignorance.


37 posted on 07/13/2021 11:19:44 AM PDT by If You Want It Fixed - Fix It ( )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; cardinal4; ColdOne; ...
White supremacist cisgender bigotry global warming blah blah blah...

38 posted on 07/13/2021 12:34:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Peter ODonnell

Kavdlunait (plural) was the Inuit word for foreigner or European, compare modern Greenlandic qallunaaq (”Dane”), formerly spelled ĸavdlunâĸ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling


39 posted on 07/13/2021 12:50:04 PM PDT by Kevmo (some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. ~Jonathan Karl)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies]

To: wbarmy

will not stop one Real Christian from the “gathering together” for worship.
***It’s just around the corner

Revelation 13:7
Then the beast was permitted to wage war againstg the saints ...
https://biblehub.com › revelation
And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations


40 posted on 07/13/2021 12:56:25 PM PDT by Kevmo (some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. ~Jonathan Karl)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-68 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson