Vandals in the Churchyard

The Western war against Christianity goes unreported.

by Mark Steyn

One typical March weekend in Brooklyn: Vandals smash the face and arms of a marble shrine to Our Lady of Fatima at St. Gregory's Roman Catholic Church. The same night, a wooden image of Christ is torn down from the cross and broken into pieces at St. Francis of Assisi&endash;St. Blaise Church.

For parishioners at St. Francis, it was the second assault on their church in little more than two months: In January, the statues of both Francis and Our Lady of Fatima were decapitated. This kind of thing is becoming routine. A dozen Catholic churches have been desecrated in Brooklyn in the last six months -- though, in a belated attempt at ecumenicalism, in the last week of March an Episcopal church was targeted, too. The media, happy to hop on Jesse Jackson's and Bill Clinton's bandwagon and be taken for a ride about an entirely mythical spate of black church burnings a couple of years back, are largely indifferent to the actual, real assaults on churches which occur every day. The Clinton-Jacksonian fictional church burnings were about racial hatred, whereas these attacks demonstrate only anti-religious hatred, and who cares about that? Most of the recent Brooklyn church attacks were buried in the New York Times somewhere round page B6 in the Metro News Briefs. But eventually some Times editor noticed that Metro had been running the same church vandalization News Brief week in, week out for months on end and decided that maybe the series of religious desecrations merited a short 700 word piece on page B1, which duly ran on March 22.

On International Women's Day, I happened to be in Montreal, where a feminist collective decided to mark the occasion by sacking the Marie-Reine-du-Monde cathedral, the city's Roman Catholic basilica. The group sprayed anti-religious slogans on the walls, smeared paintings with soiled sanitary napkins, hurled used condoms at terrified worshippers -- all to protest the Church's position on abortion....

...The early Apostles wouldn't have been surprised. As Paul wrote in his Second Epistle to Timothy, "In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers... Heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God... Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof."

"A form of godliness" is a good way of putting it: You elevate your "pleasures" and their attendant paraphernalia -- condoms, abortion clinics -- into a new creed of "tolerance" and "diversity" that eventually supplants traditional morality. No news is good news, and God news is no news at all. On the matter of AIDS and homophobia, the gay crowd have a good slogan: "Silence = acceptance." On the accelerating anti-Christian hatred in Western society (which is really a form of societal self-hatred), we have been silent and accepting for too long.

This article also appears in the May 2000 issue of The American Spectator.

(Posted 6/6/00)