It was the Church that first spoke out against Hitler, in the courageous sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich and in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, drafted for Pope Pius XI by his successor, Pope Pius XII, while the rest of the world was appeasing the dictator.
It was the Church, through the courage of countless priests and prelates, from Cardinal Mindszenty to Pope St. John Paul II, that implacably opposed Communism.
The burning to the ground of a dozen Catholic churches is Canada’s Kristallnacht. For now there is a new totalitarianism, which conflates the worst features of the ideological Marxism of the Chinese Communist Party with the economic Fascism of the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany.
This new totalitarianism calls itself wokery. It has deeply infected most Western countries. The “Democrats” in the United States, the Trudeau administration in Ottawa, the unelected Kommissars who rule the European tyranny-by-clerk through “Commission Regulations” that are in reality binding decrees – all of these and many more call themselves “woke”.
It is the Church, through her unwavering opposition to divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexuality and other assaults upon the natural Christian family that was once the glory of the West, that those who call themselves “woke” regard as their greatest and most effective opponent.
Like all totalitarians, the woke mob know that the ancient religion one of whose precepts is that “The truth shall set you free” has always stood and will always stand in determined opposition to all forms of totalitarianism.
One of the fires started by the Communist rioters not only flattened a village church but destroyed the entire village, killing two people. But don’t ask for sympathy for the victims of the latest Communist violence from the Canadian government.
Mr Trudeau, the hard-Left Canadian prime minister, has been arresting pastors who wanted to keep services going during the pandemic, and has even had fences put around their churches.
Worse, he dithered for a week before saying anything and then, because the rioters were supporters of his, the most he could bring himself to say was, “That’s not the way to go.”
Gerry Butts, one of Trudeau’s advisers, was more explicit in backing the rioters: “I understand the anger that’s out there.” In 2017, he had said, “Christians are the worst part of Canadian society.”
The head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, one Harsha Walia, tweeted, “Burn it all down.” Ten days after she said that, she has still not been fired from her job. Nor has she been prosecuted under Canada’s recently-tightened hate-speech laws. On the contrary: various board members have come out in her support.
For there is one law for the Communists and one law for the rest of us.
Ezra Levant, the splendid conservative commentator from the Rebel News independent TV station, is offering $10,000 for tips leading to the arrest of the church arsonists.
The pretext for the church-burning was the supposed discovery of thousands of “unknown graves” of indigenous Canadians near Catholic churches in western Canada. In fact – a fact that was carefully concealed from the Canadian people by the Marxstream media – the graves were not “unknown” but unmarked, as was the custom of the time. They were in recognised cemeteries.
Ms Heidi Matthews, of Harvard Law School (a nest of Communist vipers) described the arson as “a right of resistance to extreme and systemic injustice”.
The fact that, even in the past, the churches had not been burying people for anything other than the usual reason made no difference to Ms Matthews. In fact, several of the “unknown graves” were in cemeteries that are still in use.
The rioters also tore down statues of Queen Victoria and of the present Queen, neither of whom had any conceivable connection with the alleged (but actually fictitious) wrongdoing of the churches. That did not stop the rioters from uttering mindless chants of “No pride in genocide!”
Now, genocide is taking place today, right now, in Sinkiang Province, north-western China, and also in occupied Tibet, where the entire population has been enslaved and subjected to forced labour in the lithium mines that provide battery power for electric cars, as well as to forced interbreeding with the racialist Han Chinese, in an attempt to wipe out the Tibetan race. Millions have been imprisoned, tortured and killed. However, as far as I can discover, there have been no far-Left demonstrations against genocide outside the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.
The indigenous Canadians in whose name the violence is nominally taking place (it is, of course, just like the Black Lives Matter violence, where any pretext will do) have begged the Communists to desist. For in Canada most of the churches are particularly welcoming to the aboriginal population, and are a major source of strength and support for them.
For this and many other reasons, the Communist rioters’ crimes could not possibly be more misconceived and less justifiable. Yet a campaigner for homosexual “rights” wrote on Twitter: “It’s so beautiful to see people waking up and rising up all over the world. The burning of churches in Canada to tearing down a Queen Elizabeth statue. Amazing things. This is the great awakening.”
Another Twitter user, this time from the United States, wrote (again on Twitter): “Can we also start burning down catholic churches here? I like this new trend Canada started. It genuinely makes me happy to see Catholic churches burning in Canada – So proud of these first nations people taking down their power and tearing down symbols of so much disgusting oppression across history. Let ’em burn””
We must pray for all these hate-filled totalitarians, supporters of the Communist creed of universal hatred. We must pray for their victims, who have died in the flames of their hatre, and for the aboriginal congregations dispossessed of their churches by those who would exploit them.
It is by love that we shall defeat the haters. If the gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church, the crazed arsonists of Western Canada and their pipsqueak prime minister certainly won’t.
