[SD Note: The extent of “protests” against boarding schools once operated by Catholics that harbored indigenous children in Canada has reached a critical level and hopefully will now begin to diminish. If it continues further, a huge alarm of persecution should be rung, not just in Canada but in the U.S. and other nations, where those who so choose can find or conjure reasons for torching churches and defacing statues, even if those reasons are flawed, often profoundly — as in the Canadian situation (where yes there was abuse and neglect by the Catholics who operated them but the deaths of Indian schoolchildren in Catholic schools cannot, for the main part, be placed at the doorstep of Catholicism; the government was more responsible, as were simple circumstances such as outbreaks of tuberculosis, smallpox, and the 1918 influenza.]
From the New York Post:
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.
From the Countersignal:
Terrorists are attacking and burning down churches across Canada with impunity.
It’s a reality most Canadians only thought possible for Middle Eastern countries like Syria, where ISIS has bombarded and razed dozens of Christian heritage sites in the name of Islam. Now, after nearly six years of Liberals calling Canadians racist and fanning the flames of hatred, hate crimes are becoming commonplace against Christians in Canada. Things have gotten so bad that even our American neighbours are beginning to worry.
Rightly so. The Counter Signal has kept a close eye on these terrorist attacks, reporting on the scene just hours after a fire in a refugee church. Our information shows that since June, there have been 45 attacks on Christian and mainly Roman Catholic congregations. Of those, 17 of them have been scorched or burnt to a crisp in suspicious circumstances.
From Catholic World Report:
‘Sentiment is a dangerous thing. Truth and reconciliation both suffer when it is weaponized.’
Over the past fortnight, some dozen churches in Canada, many serving indigenous people, were torched. A dozen more, most in non-indigenous contexts, were vandalized. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, to supportive cheers even in the legal community.
The chaos ensued after discovery of the remains of hundreds of indigenous youths, buried near the residential schools in which they were enrolled under a policy backed by the Indian Act of 1876, amendments to which in 1894 and 1920 made attendance at residential or industrial schools compulsory for those who lacked access to day schools. The last of the former, many of which were operated by the Catholic Church, closed its doors in 1996. Over more than a century, about 140,000 children passed through these schools. Upward of four thousand—perhaps as many as ten thousand—passed away while attending them or expired soon afterward.
How could this be? Who is responsible? Are the religious organizations who operated the residential schools the real culprits, as many suppose? A careful examination shows that supposition to be flawed. The tragedy, as we shall see, and the crimes it involved—crimes some are falsely characterizing as genocide—began with government-mandated violation of parental rights, an error gaining currency again today.
[As for the U.S.]
From Associated Press:
Apache students who were among the first sent to a New Mexico boarding school bankrolled by East Coast parishioners and literary fans. The first showed the girls bundled in blankets with moccasins on their feet. The next, taken just weeks later, was starkly different, the children posing in plaid uniforms, high-laced boots and wide-brimmed straw hats.
Adjunct history professor Larry Larrichio said he stumbled upon the 1885 photos while researching a military outpost, and “it just brought a tear to my eye.”
The images represented the systematic attempt by the U.S. government, religious organizations and other groups to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society by removing them from their homes and shipping them off to boarding school. The effort spanned more than a century and is now the focus of what will be a massive undertaking by the U.S. government as it seeks to uncover the troubled legacy of the nation’s policies related to Native American boarding schools, where reports of physical and sexual abuse were widespread.
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