No one has right to burn churches: religious freedom director

Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett, one of Canada’s leading Catholic public figures and intellectuals, strongly condemned the growing violence and hatred aimed at the Catholic Church, while at the same time diagnosing its cause. Following is a partial transcript of an interview with The B.C. Catholic.

B.C. Catholic: What do you make of the arsons, vandalism, and hatred directed at Catholics?

Father Deacon Bennett: Let me say first off that the anger [at the Church] is understandable at what happened with residential schools, but the violence is inexcusable. And if there’s one thing that history has taught us is that violence begets violence and the last thing we want to do is to create new victims.

It’s also worth noting that the majority of these churches that have been burned down are those that serve First Nations individuals who are faithful Christians. So, the argument that is being made by some people, implicitly or explicitly, is that they shouldn’t be Christian. It’s insulting and denigrating of those First Nations people. It robs them of agency.

They have freedom to embrace their Christian faith. And no one has the right to question that, let alone to burn down their churches, where they gather to express their love of Christ, their love of the Church, of their Christian faith, and their Indigenous culture.

You cannot respond with violence of this sort, or with the sort of hate we see coming from the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. That does not serve to build up our common life.

B.C. Catholic: Where do you think the anti-Catholic hatred is coming from?

Father Deacon Bennett: I think hatred is a product of grave ignorance and an equally grave inability to see in the other one’s own humanity. And sadly in Canada, we’re seeing not only an increase in anti-Catholic sentiment, anti-Christian sentiment, but also anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim, and that’s been steadily on the rise.

It results, I firmly believe, from this inability for us to see, in the other, ourselves. This is aided and abetted by an increasingly atomized culture where we exist in our own little worlds, where we don’t have face to face contact with people, and the pandemic has exacerbated this. And we’re seeing the breakdown in community. People can be isolated behind their Twitter accounts, and they can say things that are profoundly hurtful and profoundly hateful because they don’t have to engage the person face to face ….

B.C. Catholic: How should the Church move forward in response to this?

Father Deacon: What is needed in the Church today is for faithful people to be formed and equipped with the necessary apologetic language to be able to engage these issues, in charity and humility.

Rev. Dr. Andrew P.W. Bennett, an ordained deacon in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, is director of the Cardus Religious Freedom Institute, and served as Canada's first Ambassador for Religious Freedom from 2013 to 2016. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) in Washington.