What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society

08.09.2024 05:05

Godless, secular, anti-Christian sentiment is reaching a fever pitch, and it is completely incompatible with the foundations of Western civilization. Evidence of this phenomenon is readily available across the globe, but ultra-liberal France offers a particularly alarming illustration. Just last week, the historic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer, in Northern France, was set ablaze and nearly burned to the ground. The fire raged for three hours and consumed the roof and bell tower, before being extinguished by about 120 firefighters.

The fire, of course, was no accident. The arsonist responsible has been identified as Joël Vigoureux, a left-wing, anti-Christian extremist with a lengthy record of crimes; he has been convicted at least eight times for setting fire to churches, although he is suspected of having burned down nearly twice as many. In 2019, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for burning down a church. The day after he was released, he burned down another church.

To those of us who regularly peruse European headlines, it seems as though a church is burned to the ground in France about every week or two. It turns out that this perception is very nearly the truth. In 2021, the Observatoire du patrimoine religieux (Observatory of Religious Heritage) in Paris warned that Christian churches and monuments were being destroyed at a rate of approximately one every two weeks. Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatoire du patrimoine religieux, observed that while there are still more Christian (and specifically Catholic) sites of worship in France than Muslim, a new Mosque is built in France every 15 days, while one Christian church is destroyed, demolished, or burned down at roughly the same rate.

This anti-Catholic violence is spreading quickly across Europe: an Irish military chaplain was stabbed last month in Galway, where “Mohammed” just became the most popular birth name; a 1,000-year-old Catholic church in Germany was burned down last year, with the arsonist targeting the historic high altar; a machete-wielding Islamist in Spain slaughtered a sacristan and wounded a priest as he attacked multiple churches last year. While the drastic increase in crimes against Catholics in Europe may be largely attributed to the unmitigated influx of Muslim immigration, the root of anti-Catholic violence has a different source in America.

According to CatholicVote, just shy of 450 Catholic churches have been targeted for vandalism, desecration, and arson in the U.S. since May of 2020. Over 280 of those incidents have occurred just since the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade was leaked in the first half of 2022. Islam, imported by godless liberal secularists, may be the chief motivating factor behind attacks on churches in Europe, but abortion is the religion of the anti-Catholics in America.

The Catholic Church has, of course, long stood against abortion, unequivocally declaring the slaughter of the unborn a grave moral evil. The Catholic Church has led the charge against abortion in the U.S. It was Catholic priests and bishops who first railed against slaying the unborn in the New World, it was Catholic bishops who organized the first nationwide campaigns against abortion, even before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, and it was Catholic Supreme Court justices who decided in 2022 to do the right thing and overturn the disastrous precedent that had allowed for the butchering of over 63 million unborn American children.

It is then only reasonable, at least according to the sort of reason that reigns in Hell, for those who worship at the altar of abortion to see the Catholic Church as their chief enemy. In the end, it is not, for abortion acolytes, a matter of defending women’s rights, of fighting for bodily autonomy, nor even entirely of enjoying consequence-free sex. The latter, consequence-free sex, is the hollow promise made to them by their new god, Moloch. But just as the adorers of Moloch in ancient times could not bear to be told by faithful prophets that they are, in fact, hurling their own children into hungry flames and that that’s a bad thing, so today the followers of Moloch — known by new, sterilized names, be it “abortion” or “reproductive rights” or, most diabolical of all, “reproductive freedom” — cannot abide to share a society with any who would see their child sacrifice as anything less than noble, liberating, and worshipful.

Indeed, the Catholic Church does see child sacrifice through abortion as a form of worship, but it is the worship of self, the worship of demons, the worship of Hell. Those who choose to slay their own children — not, as in the days of old, on altars or before great golden idols, but in quiet little operating rooms in quiet little office buildings — see the Catholic Church as an existential threat to their own chosen religion and their way of life (or, rather, of death) and, thus, attack the Church. Or at least what they perceive the Church to be.

Although cathedrals and chapels are important, and even crucial, to the Church, and attacks against them are, indeed, against the Church herself, they are not the essence of the Church, just as abortion mills and gay bars are not the essence of the leftist zeitgeist. These two spiritual realities — the one noble and the gateway to life everlasting, the other corrupted and a doorway to unending misery — are waging war in our nation and our world even now. One will inevitably be defeated. The only question is whether we will live our lives in such a way as to further the noble or the corrupt.

Disgracefully, a Catholic Cardinal Fronts for Abortion

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