Is Morinville Burning?

 

The most beautiful church in Alberta, perhaps the most beautiful building, has burned down.

You may not have heard.

St. Jean-Baptiste rose like a miracle from the flat prairie landscape, its silver roof reflecting the strong prairie sun. It was the centrepiece of Morinville. I used to marvel at it each time, on the way into Edmonton: this perfect piece of old Quebec in northern Alberta. 

Alberta, sadly, has few old, historic, or traditional buildings of any kind. Now St. Jean-Baptiste is gone.

It is probably a case of arson. The local priest says he fears for his life. A number of Catholic churches, some others as historic, have been burned to the ground or vandalized across Canada in the past few weeks. You probably have not noticed. It is hard to find information in the Canadian media; there is nothing about any of this, for example, on Canadian news aggregator Bourque Newswatch. The best sources for the story I have found so far are from India and the Philippines. 

It looks like a gathering anti-Catholic pogrom; and this news, if not suppressed, is being mostly ignored by Canadian media and politicians. At the same time, all it seems they can talk about is the discoveries, one by one, of the graves of indigenous children near the sites of the old Indian residential schools. 

This “news” tends to foment hatred towards Catholics, since the Catholic Church ran most of those schools. It looks almost like a coordinated campaign, 

And the “discovery” of indigenous graves on indigenous reserves is not news. Every community in Canada has a cemetery; people die. In particular, in the 19th and earlier 20th century, children died. One estimate is that one third to one half of all Canadian children died before their fifth birthday. 

Everyone has always known of these particular gravesites. All that was not known was the number of interred; local bands apparently kept no records, and the official government records were lost to a recycling drive in Ottawa. 

Reporting on their “discovery” is fake news. It seems crafted to foment hatred against the Catholic Church, and to turn people away from faith. 

One almost suspects something cynical in the demand that everyone wear orange on Canada Day in supposed solidarity with the native people. Why orange? In the Canadian context, the colour orange meant and means opposition to the Catholic Church. 

Canada had the world’s largest membership in the Orange Order, an organization formed in explicit opposition to Catholicism. It used to control local politics in places like Toronto, “the Belfast of North America.” 

Take a short walk in any direction at this time of year in Ontario, and you will see beds of blossoming orange lilies. The reason they are there is probably forgotten by most modern owners, but those beds were originally planted to show allegiance to the order; by tradition, they bloomed by July 12, in celebration of the Battle of the Boyne.

 Doubt any cabal is consciously plotting all this. It is the devil’s work.