In the wars being waged with the left, outright falsehoods, half truths and the convenient historical ignorance among Western societies at large serves as a ready blank slate for Marxist exploitation narratives to be written upon. Witness the spate of vicious arson attacks on twenty Canadian churches (both Catholic and Protestant) and assaults on statuary that illustrate how ignorance has been conveniently used to rally cultural terrorists to attack religion and our heroes.
Concerning these attacks against the Catholic and other Christian churches in Canada, the NOQ Report News Update sat down to discuss these developments with LIFESITE News co-founder John Henry Westen who is Canadian.
John Henry mapped out the historical context behind the chief bone of contention-the recently discovered graves of hundreds of indigenous children that have been identified near Catholic schools. These schools were mandated, by the Canadian Government, to both house and educate large numbers of Canadian indigenous children at the turn of the 19th century without adequate resources to do so.
John Henry Westen explained:
“This is about …a government policy that was horrible back at the turn of the [20th] century. Every body acknowledged that it was horrible. The plan was to take the first native people, now we call them “first nation people”, and take them away from their families and put them in schools so they could be acculturated or whatever. The point was that they stripped these children from their families, absolutely atrocious, nonetheless that was the government policy not the Church policy and yet what has happened here is to focus attention on the church, the Catholic Church specifically. By the way, the residential [boarding] schools happened in public schools, Anglican schools, Protestant schools and Catholic schools. So this was a government oriented problem, that all schools participated in because they had to-this was what the government dictated”
It’s against this historical backdrop that dates back to the early 1900’s of Canadian government mandated education of indigenous children that the children’s unmarked graves scandal exploded on news sites and front pages worldwide and then the Canadian churches burned and statuary was attacked.
Westen commented about the little known history of these schools:
“What is known about the situation is that there were huge tuberculosis problems at the time and there was actually a medical report published at the turn of the century about the problems going on in residential schools that the government was running with the problem of tuberculosis and then the problem of need for funding because the government wasnt doing its job of due diligence taking care of the proper medical health for residential school students, also wasn’t helping them with burial costs; they weren’t doing shipment of bodies so, you had this situation where, in this case it seems like a Catholic school, run by nuns, buried the children which nobody else would pay for and since the cost of burial and upkeep of the cemeteries wasn’t keeped up they seemed to go into ill repair so there they are.
Westen posits a very reasonable hypothetical to explain the unmarked graves:
“So imagine that, imagine that they were nuns, caring for these poor little kids, who died, no one would give them money to do it, they did it out of the goodness of their own hearts, they buried them because they couldn’t send their bodies [to their families] the government wouldn’t afford that, so they buried them as best they could and now, these same nuns are getting blamed for their acts of charity. Now this is all hypothetical but it makes more sense as a hypothetical than the insanity that they’re spouting.”
The study that Westen referred to was likely the report issued in 1907 by the Canadian medical officer, Dr Peter H. Bryce who warned his superiors repeatedly in the Dept. of Indian Affairs about the rampant spreading of Tuberculosis in the so called “Residential Schools” where the indigenous children were housed. Bryce visited dozens of these schools in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta and lamented the highly unsafe, epidemic enabling conditions and after he was ignored by the Canadian authorities, he eventually published a book titled: “The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada”
Alas, this story behind the headlines that tends to deflate the marshaled outrage against Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) is generally not told by the mainstream media in both Canada and the US. Thus we see acts of arson hell bent on destroying churches of different denominations-especially in indigenous communities that are applauded even by officialdom when not responded to with cowardice. Please share this far and wide to counter the fake news narrative that Christians are to blame once again when it was Christians who were doing their best with limited resources in the face of governmental fiat,
John Henry Westen is Co-Founder of the much banned and very worth reading Life Site News that is crammed with jaw-droppingly good updates that seldom fail to amaze on pro-life topics and other current health matters especially during the Covid 19 pandemic.