Virgin Mary statue scorched outside a Boston church on Saturday, July 11, 2020. (Video screenshot from NBC Boston)
A congressman is asking the Justice Department to ramp up its protections for religious liberty in response to "nearly a dozen" reports of attacks on Catholic churches in just the last few weeks.
Churches have been vandalized in the riots associated with the Black Lives Matter protests since the death of George Floyd, noted Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., in a letter to Attorney General William Barr.
Another attack on the church has been carried out by state and local officials who have adopted discriminatory practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have restricted church gatherings while allowing social gatherings, including the BLM protests.
Many of those policies are being challenged in courts.
"Since June, there have been nearly a dozen reported attacks on Catholic churches around the nation," Fleischmann said. "These disturbing attacks range from arson to the beheading of a statue of the Virgin Mary," the letter said. "I find these attacks to be a disturbing trend, happening in multiple areas across the nation, including within my own congressional district."
He quoted from Barr's speech at Notre Dame last year.
The AG said, "We must be vigilant to resist efforts by the forces of secularization to drive religious viewpoints from the public square and to impinge upon the free exercise of our faith."
The Washington Examiner reported Fleischmann said his concern was about intolerance directed toward members of any faith.
"These people who would desecrate any house of worship – whether it is a Catholic church or any other house of worship – need to know that it won’t be tolerated. And I think it rises to the level of a hate crime," he told the Examiner.
"I would like to have a recognition that this problem exists, it persists, and sadly, it is not isolated to one city or one state," Fleischmann told the Washington Examiner. "I think it needs to be looked at very carefully and addressed for the danger that it is."
The decapitated statue was at St. Stephen Catholic Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Fleischmann told local reporters at the time: "A symbol of our faith, and the fact that someone would come on to the premises of a beautiful parish and commit such a heinous act, a heinous crime is very personally upsetting. When we see these random acts of violence, especially against houses of worship, I think we all need to stand up and say this is wrong."
St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York has been vandalized, as has a Catholic cemetery at Providence College. Other incidents include the destruction of a statue of Spanish missionary Junipero Serra and a man driving his van into the Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Florida and then setting the building on fire.
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