A world lit only by fire
By Liam Gibson | 17 July 2024
On 12 July 2012, a Protestant flute band parading through Belfast in Northern Ireland paused in front of St Patrick’s Catholic church. Rather than processing past the church, the members of the band walked around in a circle while playing the melody to the Bahamian folk song The John “B” Sails. The Orangemen parading behind the band accompanied the music with the lyrics to an anti-Catholic song, popular among Protestant Scottish football fans, which repeats the refrain, “The famine is over, why don’t you go home?”
The incident received considerable attention when footage of the band was made public. Although the Orange Order claimed that it was a mere coincidence that the parade stopped outside the church, such coat-trailing was commonplace in the past. In an attempt to minimise the significance of the event, one commentator asked what all the fuss was about. The church was closed, he argued, and the band was playing in front of an empty building.
Of course, such comments fail to reflect the supernatural reality that, even when a Catholic church is closed, it is not empty as long as the Blessed Sacrament is present. And it is this fact that ensures that Catholic church buildings will always remain the target of attacks.
One hundred and four years earlier, several Catholic churches in Belfast were targeted during a protracted period of sectarian violence that left hundreds of homes burnt and businesses destroyed. Thousands of Catholics were driven from the city and almost five hundred people lost their lives. Despite constituting just a quarter of the city’s population, Catholics made up two-thirds of those killed. On 22 July 1920, St Matthew’s church, in a Catholic enclave in the east of the city, was attacked by a loyalist mob. Parishioners defended the church until troops could be stationed at its gates. In defiance, the mob hoisted two Union Flags at the entrance.1
A day or two later, the Daily Mail published a photograph of the flags, the church and the soldiers with the headline, “Where the flag still flies”. The caption read, “A Protestant Church (in Belfast) guarded by His Majesty’s troops against the rebels”. One of the priests of St Matthew’s wrote to the Mail asking for a correction but none was ever made.
Sadly, the media’s tendency to ignore, minimise and even incite violence against Catholic churches is even worse today than it was one hundred years ago. In 2021, reports in the Canadian media that ground penetrating radar had supposedly located the unmarked graves of 215 children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia caused nationwide outrage.2 Very soon similar claims were being made for other residential schools and the Catholic Church was being held directly responsible for the deaths and secret burial of hundreds of indigenous children. A spate of arson attacks on church buildings followed. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who ordered flags on government buildings to be flown at half-mast as a sign of national mourning, excused the attacks as understandable.
While increasingly lurid stories of “torture and murder, of babies thrown into the furnace and hanging from meat hooks” circulated, anyone pointing out the complete absence of evidence was denounced by government ministers as “deniers”.3
On a visit to Canada in 2022, Pope Francis apologised for the Church’s role in “the policies of assimilation and enfranchisement, which also included the residential school system, [that] were devastating for the people of these lands.” He asked for forgiveness for what he described as “genocide”. Both the Pope and the Prime Minister were happy to accept the Church’s guilt without questioning why no actual graves had ever been found. It has since become clear that there are not, nor ever were, any mass graves.
A similar epidemic of violent attacks on churches in the United States began in May 2022, when the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked to the press. Since then, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has recorded 333 incidents of arson, criminal damage and the desecration of Catholic sites. While the Biden administration has made full use of law enforcement to pursue and prosecute pro-life activists, the Justice Department and the FBI have shown little interest in investigating attacks carried out by abortion extremists such as Jane’s Revenge.
Fanatical pro-abortion activists in Latin America have also repeatedly targeted churches. In one of the worst incidents, a mob of hundreds of militant feminists attempted to gain access to the Cathedral Basilica of SS Peter and Cecilia in Mar de Plata, Argentina. They managed to tear down the gates and hurled rocks, bottles and paint at the building. Fortunately, their way was blocked by a group of young men who linked arms to form a barrier. The men prayed the rosary loudly as the baying crowd threw faeces, jeered, taunted and spat on them. Eventually, the police intervened to disperse the crowd, which led the press to accuse them of using excessive force, whilst ignoring the violence of the demonstrators themselves. The lobby group “Catholics for a Free Choice” issued a statement berating the police for their “brutality”.
International Women’s Day, celebrated on 8 March, has increasingly become the occasion for attacks by radical feminists on churches, particularly in Spain. According to the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC), which records attacks on Christian sites, there was a significant rise in cases of arson and attempted arson against churches in 2022 compared to the previous year. While, in 2021, OIDAC documented 60 such incidents, there were 106 cases in 18 different countries in 2022. The countries with the most arson attacks were Germany, with 37, followed by France and Italy, each with 16 cases, and the UK with 9. The report found that the motivation behind anti-Christian vandalism and attacks on property could frequently be identified through the graffiti, leaflets left behind or social media postings claiming responsibility. It states:
“Our data from 2022 contains 11 cases that showed a satanistic background, 16 attacks were identified as coming from far-left Antifa or anarchist groups, 11 attacks were perpetuated by Islamist groups, 9 cases were perpetrated by extreme feminist or LGBTIQ groups, and 4 cases came from “anti-Clerical” groups. Furthermore, there was one case perpetuated by climate activists, and 9 attacks were allegedly caused by religious-ethnic bias, most of which were related to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.”4
Coverage of the blaze that, in recent days, destroyed the spire of the gothic cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Rouen, Normandy, shows just how keen the media and government authorities are to play down the possibility that such fires are started deliberately, although the frequency with which they occur would make it unlikely that all of them are accidental; nor is need for caution a concern when synagogues or mosques are targeted.
Attacks on churches are, consciously or unconsciously, an attack on the Body of Christ. To the secular mind, a church is an assembly building. While a Protestant church plays the role of a synagogue, a Catholic church is the equivalent of the Temple in Jerusalem, a place of sacrifice. But while it was the altar in the Temple that made the sacrifice holy, in the Catholic Mass, it is the sacrifice that makes the altar holy and the fabric of the building is an extension of the altar.5 It is in this space where “Christ and the Church celebrate their wedding feast and consummate their marriage.”6 In the past, this was made visible through the construction of a baldacchino over the high altar in basilicas and cathedrals, which played a similar role to the chuppah in the second part of the Jewish wedding ceremony, symbolising the home prepared for the bride by the bridegroom.7
The desecration and destruction of churches have occurred throughout history, but the visceral hatred of God in formerly Christian countries has become particularly intense. Radical feminists, Islamists and the homosexual lobby have been empowered by politicians who seek to justify their acts of violence. Over the years, the mainstream media has proven to be both an instigator and an apologist for such violence. Meanwhile, the attempts to make the Catholic Church more acceptable to the enemies of the faith have not provided a solution. If anything, such a craven approach has merely deepened their contempt. And that contempt was vividly demonstrated last February when the sacrilegious funeral of a transgender prostitute desecrated St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
The foundation stone of St Patrick’s was laid in 1858 by Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864), from County Tyrone, Ireland. Hughes knew well that the world hated both Catholics and the Catholic faith and was fearless in the face of it. In his biography of Hughes, John Loughery recounts that when, in 1844, anti-Catholic violence threatened to break out in New York, the mayor of the city asked the Archbishop if “he feared for the safety of the city’s Catholic churches; in Philadelphia, only weeks before, crowds had torched homes and churches, chasing Irishmen through the blazing streets at night.” Loughery recounts the Archbishop’s reply:
“No, Hughes had purportedly told the mayor in what became a legendary exchange; he feared more for the Protestant churches in the event of such an attack. If the authorities could not keep order, he was said to have promised the mayor ‘a second Moscow’.”8
When Napoleon’s army entered Moscow in 1812, they found the city in ruins; deserted and set ablaze. But the Archbishop’s remark was not so much a threat as a warning of what happens when the legitimate authority refuses to face down aggression. No civilised society can exist for long in a world where might makes right. Governments in Europe and America have long turned a blind eye to the targeting of Catholic churches by their political allies. The lessons of the past show that leaders of the Church must hold the civil authorities to account, not least because the escalation of violence will always end in bloodshed.
During the American Civil War, Archbishop Hughes successfully represented the Union to European leaders. He was a diplomat but he was also a realist when it came to human nature. He knew that while conversion was possible for all, not everyone would accept it. A dialogue with those who hated God and rejected the Catholic faith was simply impossible. He was unconcerned with popularity or the good opinion of the press. An unintended but inevitable consequence of today’s policy of “inclusion” and “accompaniment” has been that bishops are tasked with managing the slow decline of the Catholic Church in the West. Only when the hierarchy accepts that the world will always hate the followers of Christ will they once again fulfil its mission to set the world on fire (cf. Luke 12:49).
Notes
- G B Kenna (T Donaldson ed), Fact and Figures: The Belfast Pogroms 1920-22, (O’Connell, 1997) pp 20–21. G B Kenna was the pseudonym of Fr John Hassan, curate of St Mary’s Church, Belfast. His book was withdrawn from circulation immediately following its publication as the Catholic Bishops of Ireland and the government of the Irish Free State fear publicity of the violence in Belfast would fuel sectarian violence.
- C P Champion and Tom Flanagan, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) (True North/Dorchester Books, 2023).
- Tom Flanagan and Brian Giesbrecht, “The false narrative of residential school burials“, The Dorchester Review, 1 March 2022.
- Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe: Annual Report 2022/23, p 13.
- Cf. Eusebius of Caesarea (c 340), “Panegyric on the splendour of affairs”, chapter 4 of Church History. St Eusebius identifies the altar with Christ Himself writing, “And the souls of some of those, namely, who are committed to each of them for instruction and care — may be seats for angels. But the great and august and unique altar, what else could this be than the pure holy of holies of the soul of the common priest of all? Standing at the right of it, Jesus himself, the great High Priest of the universe, the Only Begotten of God, receives with bright eye and extended hand the sweet incense from all, and the bloodless and immaterial sacrifices offered in their prayers, and bears them to the heavenly Father and God of the universe.”
- Scott Hahn, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (Doubleday/Apple, 1999), location 164.
- This idea is reflected in Our Lord’s words: “And if I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to myself; that where I am, you also may be.” (John 14:3)
- John Loughery, Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (Cornell University Press, 2018), p 9.