Unabated Attacks on Catholic Churches
Earlier this month in the town of East Bridgewater, Massachusetts – not far from where the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth to establish a new way of life free from religious persecution – two twelve-year-olds walked into a Catholic church after school and set a Bible on fire on the altar.
Initial reports suggested police would not prosecute the minors, but they apparently found enough evidence of malicious intent to charge them in juvenile court.
Normally an incident like this would be little more than a local crime story attributable to bad behavior. But this act of hatred by two children was the 200th such act of violence and vandalism against a Catholic church in the United States since the leak of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on May 2, 2022.
Pro-abortion groups like Jane's Revenge and Ruth Sent Us called for retaliation against the Catholic Church after the leak. In the weeks that followed, Catholic churches across the country were subjected to mobs of pro-abortion rioters outside their churches; destruction of statues and holy objects; pro-abortion and satanic graffiti; and acts of arson which caused massive destruction.
Nearly eighteen months later, the violence has continued unabated. During slow periods, attacks on churches have occurred about once a week; during hot periods, there is a new one almost every day.
The surge in violence after Dobbs was gasoline on a fire which had already been burning. In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, Catholic churches were caught up in rioting across the country throughout the summer of 2020. But while the civil unrest eventually cooled, the attacks on churches did not. Since May 2020, we have documented 365 acts of violence and vandalism against Catholic churches.
These are not easily explainable acts like theft of petty cash from the poor box. In fact, we exclude those incidents which appear to have a simple material motive. Many of the attacks we've tracked have a clear political motive, like the spray-painting of threats on a Michigan church in the weeks before that state's vote on an amendment to legalize abortion through nine months. Others have a deeply creepy spiritual element, such as incidents where the attackers stole consecrated hosts but left behind the expensive gold tabernacle which held them, or burned sacred objects whose significance would not be evident to someone who did not intimately understand Catholic practices.
Some of the other attacks are undoubtedly related to drug use or mental illness. But regardless of the specific circumstances of individual attacks, the pattern of politically- and spiritually-motivated hostility against Catholic churches is undeniable.
Local police departments are doing what they can, but most perpetrators are not as easy to find as two kids who set a fire in a church in the middle of the day. We have found records of arrests in only about 25% of the attacks.
This is not for lack of effort by local police, who have worked diligently with pastors to identify and apprehend the attackers. The issue is that local police do not have the resources to get a grip on a nationwide surge of violence.
The Biden administration has shown zero intention of helping. To date, there has been no federal prosecution or allocation of federal funds to combat these attacks. An act of vandalism against a mosque earlier this year earned swift condemnation from the White House. We agree – no place of worship of any faith should be targeted. But when it comes to attacks on Catholic churches, the second Catholic president has been silent. In fact, when asked about the attacks on churches and pregnancy centers after the Dobbs leak, Biden simply replied, "Keep protesting. Keep making your voices heard."
Each of these attacks could be prosecuted under the FACE Act, which provides penalties for people who damage or obstruct an abortion clinic or a place of worship. But the federal government has continued its policy of disproportionate enforcement of the FACE Act against peaceful pro-lifers rather than domestic terrorists who attack churches, leaving many pastors no choice but to hire security guards and train parishioners to deter violence. This is a state of affairs which hearkens back to the 1800s, when Catholics suffered attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other domestic terror groups.
We have pushed the Department of Justice repeatedly to devote federal law enforcement resources to combat the violence against Catholic churches. On the few occasions we've gotten a response, there were platitudes but no follow-through.
It's not a reach to hypothesize that if right-wing extremists were attacking places of worship of some other religion by the hundreds, the Biden administration would have long ago created a federal task force to stop it, and rightfully so. Even a single act of hatred by two twelve-year-olds against another religious group would lead to calls for a national conversation on our political climate.
But when left-wing extremists go after Catholics, the response is…crickets.
Tommy Valentine is Director of the Accountability Project at CatholicVote.
