It’s time to extinguish church arsons and what fuels them
Religious freedoms and the right to worship have been a recognized hallmark of civilized societies for centuries. The preamble of Canada’s constitution says our country is built on principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God and the rule of law. In defiance of both, almost 600 Canadian places of worship have suffered arson in recent years. Could anything be less Canadian?
The stats were revealed by Member of Parliament Marc Dalton following a formal inquiry to the federal government. The response showed 592 arsons have been set on places of worship between 2010 and 2022. They rose from 58 in 2020 to 90 in 2021, then down to 74 in 2022.
The peak coincides with the claim of the discovery of the remains of 215 school children on the former site of the Kamloops Residential School in May of 2021.
Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a subsequent wave of church burnings “unacceptable and wrong,” he also called their potential motivation “real and fully understandable.” This didn’t douse the flames.
These arsons far outnumber those made on Canadian churches in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, which opposed non-Protestants and non-whites. In those years the KKK desecrated Sarnia’s St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. They killed ten people when they set Saint-Boniface College in Winnipeg on fire. They also burned the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. In 1926, three Klan members were jailed after they blew up St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Barrie, Ontario.
The Klan soon fizzled out, unlike recent church burnings. The 110-year-old Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses Catholic church burned down in Trois-Rivières, Quebec last month. Whether arson was involved has not been confirmed.
