Posted on 06/02/2023 11:37:19 AM PDT by nickcarraway
In the San Francisco area last week, a district attorney downgraded the charges against five people who desecrated the statue of a saint on Catholic church grounds from felonies to misdemeanors.
In Washington state, the Justice Department last month recommended no jail time for a transgender person who defaced church property and assaulted a church employee.
In Washington, D.C., a man who destroyed the statues of three saints at a Catholic school appears to have pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor that allowed him to avoid serving his prison sentence.
With high-profile attacks on Catholic churches and organizations on the rise over the past two years, advocates have grown frustrated with what they say is a lack of consequences for people who target Catholics relative to the consequences for people who target other religions or minority groups.
What started as the destruction of church property during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests turned toward attacks motivated by the Supreme Court’s 2022 abortion ruling and, most recently, the defacement of churches in the name of the transgender rights movement.
Too often, critics say, any suspects caught for such illegal activity escape the more severe consequences that apply to crimes of hate. Instead, suspects sometimes face only low-level vandalism or theft charges that don’t land them behind bars.
The Religious Freedom Institute reported attacks at 174 Catholic sites between May 2020 and September of last year.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has tracked 260 anti-Catholic incidents since May 2020.
CatholicVote, a Catholic advocacy group, says there have been 324 attacks on Catholic churches since May 2020.
The FBI said anti-Catholic hate crimes made up 6.1% of all religion-related hate crimes in 2021, which means the FBI recorded roughly 95 anti-Catholic incidents that year. The bureau said this was a decrease from 2020.
The FBI also reported that religion-related hate crimes fell in 2020 from the 2019 level.
But Catholic groups say the attacks started to increase in 2020 and have intensified dramatically in 2022, particularly in the wake of the May 2022 leak that revealed how the Supreme Court was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Tommy Valentine, director of the Catholic Accountability Project at CatholicVote, said the group’s reporting suggests police manage to track down a suspect in only about a quarter of attacks.
“That seems to be the exception rather than the norm, not because the police departments are not wanting to investigate these things, but that they don’t have the resources to combat what’s really part of a nationwide epidemic,” Valentine told the Washington Examiner.
What police departments need, he said, is resources from the federal government to combat clear instances of hate crimes.
“If you look at cases where, you know, a mosque gets vandalized, or this push around anti-Asian hate and things like this — if it happens to any other group, the federal government is right on top of it,” Valentine said. “As we should, right? We’re not complaining about that. The issue is that when the attacks are against Catholic churches, there’s no response.”
The suspect in Washington, D.C., does not appear to have faced hate crime charges despite, at the time of his arrest in August of last year, the Metro Police Department’s announcement that it was opening a hate crime investigation.
That suspect destroyed a statue of St. Anthony of Padua and desecrated a statue of St. Mary and a statue of St. Joseph outside a Catholic school.
Prosecutors in the nation’s capital, who often decline to prosecute other types of crime, appear to have allowed the man to plead guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge, according to court documents, and then allowed the one week the man spent behind bars during his case to exempt him from any further jail time.
A spokesperson for the MPD told the Washington Examiner that the case was closed when the suspect was arrested in August.
“A designation as a hate crime by MPD does not mean that prosecutors will prosecute it as a hate crime,” the spokesperson said.
The treatment of the Catholic school attacker, who had a prior criminal history, differed starkly from the treatment of an anti-abortion activist in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail last summer for a trespassing charge after handing out roses to women in the waiting room of an abortion clinic.
In the case of the San Francisco-area church, the five people who splashed red paint on a statue of St. Junipero Serra before tearing it to the ground in 2020 initially faced felony charges. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone at the time called the charges a “breakthrough moment for Catholics” because, he said, so few people who target symbols of Christian faith face felonies.
Last week, however, the district attorney reversed course, downgrading the charges to misdemeanors and saying publicly that the defendants’ participation in “restorative justice” classes spared them further punishment.
Cordileone responded with outrage, arguing that “this course of action would not have been taken with anyone else.”
“In fact, this crime likely would have been charged as a hate crime, at least if it were perpetrated against certain other minority and vulnerable groups of people,” he said.
In Oakdale, California, police arrested a man suspected of a hate crime for repeatedly vandalizing two churches in 2022, including by smashing their windows. It wasn’t the first time he’d been arrested on charges of targeting Christian houses of worship; the year before, he’d been arrested after allegedly throwing rocks at church windows.
“He was deliberately targeting places of worship,” police Lt. Andrew Stever said after the arrest.
But the district attorney ultimately charged the man only with vandalism, not with the hate crime charge police sought.
In Bellevue, Washington, a transgender person who destroyed a statue of St. Mary, defaced walls with profane messages like “f*** Catholics,” and assaulted a worker at a Catholic church last year was offered a plea deal by the Biden Justice Department that would involve no time behind bars and three years of probation.
Police had said at the time of the arrest in June 2022 that they planned to book the person on charges of a hate crime and felony assault.
Even when attacks on Catholic churches have resulted in prison time for the perpetrators, the punishment often appears far lighter than what people who target other religious sites face.
For example, in April, a Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to intentionally setting fire to a Catholic church in Pittsfield, causing $10,000 in damage.
He was sentenced to roughly three years in prison. State prosecutors recommended a maximum of four, and they did not charge him with a hate crime.
Later that same week in April, the Biden Justice Department touted a guilty plea it had secured for federal charges of a hate crime and arson against a man who’d intentionally set fire to a synagogue in Texas. He faces up to 20 years in prison at his sentencing later this month.
They particularly hate statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary because of the filth they live in.
But hate-crime charges are being considered for the destruction of a paper ‘gay-pride’ flag at an elementary school.
This is 100% WRONG but I can’t help wonder if the actions of “Catholic Charaties” being one of the main NGOs sucking in taxpayer dollard while helping care for and move illegal alien would have a very negative effect on the image of “The Church”.
How many people are even aware of Catholic Charities and what it does?
Catholic Churches which say Latin Masses should install security cameras at their parking lots.
Identifying FBI agents taking down license plate numbers of communicants.
I remember a friend whose uncle was a high executive at Catholic Charities. He was a gay man, who was not Catholic, and made no secret of the fact he didn't like Catholics.
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.