One day this month in Canada, 10 Catholic churches were vandalized in a single city, Calgary. In the last month, arsonists and vandals have attacked dozens of Canadian churches, burning some entirely to the ground.
America has 70.5 million Catholics; Canada, with just over a 10th of the population, has close to 13 million. So this is a big story. Yet the US media aren’t interested in reporting our northern neighbor’s plague of church burnings — except to suggest it’s understandable.
The attacks followed the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves near residential schools to which the government sent First Nation children from 1883 to 1996. Ground-scanning uncovered an estimated 215 graves at a British Columbia school on May 28; 751 at a Saskatchewan school on June 25; and 182 at another BC site on June 30.
The finds were shocking but not surprising. As a schoolgirl in Canada, I learned the ugly history of the country’s forced assimilation policy. Over the course of a century, 150,000 native children were torn from their families — by force, if necessary — and sent to get an English- (or French-) language education in government-funded schools run mainly by the Catholic Church.
Most of the teachers, priests, nuns and others in charge were well-meaning, though, as in any group, some bad apples took advantage of their positions to inflict abuse. The idea was to turn poverty-stricken children into productive, even prosperous, members of mainstream Canadian society — and, from the church’s perspective, to save their souls.
Indigenous languages and traditions were banned. Worse, the schools were run on the cheap, overcrowding and malnourishing a group particularly vulnerable to diseases brought from Europe.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that at least 3,200 students died, later revising that figure to 4,100. The No. 1 cause of death was tuberculosis; influenza hit hard, too. Far from home, children were often buried on site, their graves marked with wooden crosses, most of which deteriorated and disappeared.
So this year’s “discoveries” are better called “confirmations.” As Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde declared, “While it is not new to find graves at former residential schools in Canada, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.”
Yet the US press treated the news as if Canada had been hiding genocidal death camps.
“Discovery of Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Prompts Grief and Questions” ran a Washington Post headline. “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” was The New York Times’ headline.
Those headlines were false — according to all three chiefs who made the discoveries. “This is not a mass grave site, this is just unmarked graves,” Cowessess First Nation chief Cadmus Delorme said of the biggest site. Indeed, the remains aren’t even believed to be all of children. A band leader said the site was a community cemetery, including graves of nonindigenous people — unmarked because wooden markers had decomposed.
The Washington Post eventually corrected “mass grave”; the Times’ headline remains.
Church critics used that framing to justify, and even encourage, the rash of arsons. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association and the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch. “It’s very dangerous to conflate the string of church fires with violence against mosques,” activist Nora Loreto said, insisting they weren’t “hate crimes” — in other words, the Catholic Church had it coming.
The reaction was reminiscent of how the left reacted to last summer’s looting, vandalism and mass violence amid the George Floyd protests. So are the consequences, with minorities bearing the brunt of the damage: Most torched churches served indigenous communities. Almost two-thirds of Canada’s natives are Christian, and 57 percent of those are Catholic.
Church burnings are “villainizing us, when really we are the victims,” former residential-school student Cheryle Delores Gunargi O’Sullivan said. “It’s not going to help us to build relationships or rebuild relationships with religion, with the government.” Natives don’t believe the arsonists are their fellow indigenous. The attackers “must have no feelings or respect for elders or ancestors” who built the churches, said 90-year-old Carrie Allison.
One fire destroyed six stained-glass windows created to show indigenous culture can coexist with Catholicism. For mainstream media, though, the “genocide” story was too good to check: They could attack the Roman church and whites in one fell swoop. Yet it’s Canada’s natives who are being traumatized yet again.
Kelly Jane Torrance is a member of The Post Editorial Board.
Twitter: @KJTorrance
