Catholic Vancouver August 16, 2022
Anti-Catholic hate crimes rising faster than every category combined, and few seem to care
By Terry O'Neill
Canadian and international observers are condemning media, politicians, and other opinion leaders for turning a blind eye to a startling new Statistics Canada report that shows a 260 per cent increase in anti-Catholic hate crimes in the past year.
The increase in anti-Catholic attacks was almost 10 times higher than for all hate crimes combined and was by far the single largest percentage growth recorded in any category.
At the same time, experts and activists are also calling for Catholics to more forcefully respond to the sort of prejudice and bias that the media-blackout epitomizes. “We should stop talking and take action against it,” Marc Vella, president of the Christian Civic Affairs Committees of Canada, said in an interview.
StatsCan reported on Aug. 2 that the number of police-reported, hate-motivated crimes in Canada increased by 27 per cent last year, to 3,360 from 2,646 in 2020.
Hate-motivated crimes targeting religion grew by 67 per cent, to 884 from 530. (See Chart 1)
The number of anti-Catholic hate crimes grew by 260 per cent, to 155 in 2021 from just 43 the year before. Crimes directed at “Black” persons accounted for the largest number of all incidents. Anti-Jewish incidents topped the hate-crime list in the religion category, with 487 reported incidents, a 47 per cent increase. (See Chart 2)
While StatsCan provided no explanation for the huge anti-Catholic crime increase, the figures correspond to an explosion of arson, vandalism, and threats directed at Catholic institutions last summer following inflammatory news reports about the existence of possible graves at an abandoned cemetery adjoining the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
A B.C. Catholic search of mainstream online and print news coverage of the StatsCan report, among outlets such as the Canadian Press, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail, did not find a single reference to the surge of anti-Catholic hate crimes.
A Reuters story published Aug. 6 in the Vancouver Sun was typical. It quoted the president of the Chinese Canadian National council for Social Justice as calling for “actions to stop anti-Asian hate and racism.” Hate crimes against East or Southeast Asians increased 16 per cent last year.
Disappointing omission
“It’s disappointing that the mainstream media did not responsibly cover the staggering rise in anti-Catholic hate crimes,” Christian Elia, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, said in an interview.
“It’s even more disappointing that they covered the StatsCan report in general terms, alarmed at the overall 27 per cent increase in all police-reported hate-motivated crime, yet they did not acknowledge the eye-popping 260 per cent increase against Catholics specifically.”
The organization, which maintains an anti-Catholic hate-crime database, said in a news release that it will continue to fulfill its mandate by working “with the media to ensure that anti-Catholic defamation and indeed anti-Catholic violence will not be tolerated. Our politicians must speak out against this alarming trend and law enforcement officials must vigorously investigate all incidents of hate crimes against Catholics and charge those responsible.”
‘Our politicians must speak out against this alarming trend and law enforcement officials must vigorously investigate all incidents of hate crimes against Catholics and charge those responsible.’
— Catholic Civil Rights League
Canadian academic Janet Epp-Buckingham said she too is disturbed that the news media did not report on the hate-crime figures. “Government officials have been equally silent or made dismissive comments about this violence,” said Epp-Buckingham, who is a professor at Trinity Western University in Langley and director of the Laurentian Leadership Centre in Ottawa.
“The reality is that these churches are where Christians worship and find their identity as believers. Attacks on them are attacks on all Christians. We need to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to Justice.”
Worrisome international trend
Madeleine Enzlberger, executive director of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, said the new Canadian hate-crime statistics “are truly worrying” and probably represent only the tip of the iceberg.
“Unfortunately, we have seen similar trends of anti-Christian and -Catholic hatred in other Western countries as well,” Enzlberger said in an interview. “It is a dynamic in which violence against Christian buildings, churches, or even people to some extent, is perceived to be a legitimate form of protest against what the church said, did, or represents.”
She called for Canadian politicians to launch a coherent response to the attacks that “distinctively condemns these obvious acts of vigilante justice against a generation that has nothing to do with what happened in the past.”
Enzlberger warned that legitimizing violence against the Church by ignoring it “could lead to a normalization that could socially legitimize the further escalation of violence to even more severe levels. This spiral of violence needs to be broken at its earliest stages before it gets out of control.”
She said the news media’s failure to report on the rapid rise of anti-Catholic hate crime is part of a pattern. “Our research has identified four areas of life in which Christians are mostly confronted with intolerance and discrimination,” she said. “One of them is media.”
A toxic anti-Christian narrative
Enzlberger said research conducted by the British Parliament found a prevailing anti-religious and specifically anti-Christian bias, as well as a high level of religious illiteracy among media. “This bias often manifests itself in a toxic narrative that only allows for Christians to fit the role of the perpetrators and not the victim.”
She said her organization’s press releases are often “cancelled” by mainstream news media, including the Austrian state broadcaster, “even when they quote the findings of the newest hate-crime report of the OSCE [the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], a renowned international organization we have worked with for years.”
She pointed out that the OSCE’s most recent report revealed that anti-Christian hate crimes grew the most compared to other religions and also all other protected groups defined by gender, race, and ethnicity.
“In 2020, we had over 1,000 hate crimes against Christians, cases that were only reported by eight civil society organizations, and which do not even include police data,” Enzlberger said. “Sadly, the media usually ignores issues in which Christians are the victims or it negatively stereotypes or misrepresents them.
“The only thing we demand is a fair representation for everyone, no privileges or favors, just fairness and equal treatment.”
Deep-rooted bias in Canada
Ian Dowbiggin, a professor in the Department of History at the University of Prince Edward Island and a writer on Catholic issues, told The B.C. Catholic, “there's always been anti-Catholic sentiment down through Canadian history, leavened by anti-French and anti-Irish bigotry, for example, and the coverage of the Church's sexual abuse scandals of the 1980s and 1990s.”
He has been warning of the problem for decades. Writing in the Globe and Mail in 1995, Dowbiggin said, “Anti-Catholicism is as alive as it ever was, but now it's less recognizable. The new anti-Catholicism expresses itself in the form of a hip discourse that tries to reduce a worldwide church with hundreds of millions of parishioners to a handful of trendy slogans of dismissive contempt.”
The op-ed continued, “It's time we questioned the all-too-familiar public spectacle of people telling Catholics what to do and what is and isn't their business. As we try to come to grips with the challenges of imagining Canada as a truly pluralist and multicultural nation, we must eliminate the odious practice of extending generosity to some historically persecuted groups and not to others.”
Twenty-seven years later, Dowbiggin said he believes Catholics are themselves somewhat responsible for the ongoing problem. “If anti-Catholicism and hate crimes against the Church still occur today, and the media won't report them, it is due to a large extent because Catholics themselves don't push back and defend their faith,” he said.
“In other words, much of the anti-Catholicism today in the media wouldn't happen if Catholics mobilized and denounced it. Canada's Jews rightly fight back when there is evidence of anti-Semitism, so why can't Catholics in the face of things like the church burnings of 2021 and the orchestrated humiliation of the Pope in recent days?
“Are many Catholics today so ‘self-hating’ that they will permit the media to ignore the crimes committed against the Church?”
‘Time to take action’
Vella, who is a member of St. James Parish in Abbotsford, is one Catholic who is fighting back. He said the mainstream news media has been pushing an anti-Catholic narrative for decades.
“But under the ‘fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ principle, we Catholics should not bellyache and complain about how unfair our treatment in the press is,” Vella said. “Rather, we should stop talking and take action to fix the problem.”
He suggested three ways to counter anti-Catholic bias. “First, when political issues cross into the Catholic domain, Catholic dioceses need to become far more savvy in their media responses and approach,” he said. “They need to act faster and be louder. No longer should they be hiding their lamp under a bushel barrel and letting themselves be elbowed out of the public square.”
Second, he urged Catholics to be better informed about the issues confronting the Church and not to rely on mainstream news media for “balanced” reporting. “Follow journalists like Matt Taibbi and many others on Substack, subscribe to True North, the Epoch Times, and Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire to name a few,” he said. “Don't watch the CBC, the BBC. Don't read the New York Times or the Washington Post. They'll rot your brain.”
Third, he urged Catholics to get involved in public affairs and politics through associations such as the Christian Civic Affairs Committees. Vella said his organization fosters small groups in every church and parish that will be “the eyes and ears of the community when politics steps on religion's toes.”
These groups will “bring in speakers to inform congregants of political issues that are coming down the pike and will impact them. Additionally, these Civic Affairs groups should help connect people into the political process,” he said.
“We should be identifying talent in our own local communities and training those people how to advance in politics. For decades we've been reactive. It's time to be proactive.”