Dan Proft Commentary
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First, They Behead the Statues…
(intro video clip)
Really, Father, you’re unclear as to the motivation for that vandal?
Beating the head off a statue of baby Jesus on church grounds with one’s shoe is not a particularly nuanced act.
And neither is the parish priest’s unwillingness to speak with moral clarity about America’s cultural degradation. He is most certainly not ignorant of what’s happening.
We have the receipts.
According to Catholic Vote, since the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, “there have been at least 433 attacks against Catholic churches in the United States, including acts of arson which damaged or destroyed historic churches; spray-painting and graffiti of satanic messages; rocks and bricks thrown through windows; statues destroyed (often with heads cut off); and illegal disruptions of Mass. At least 268 attacks have been perpetrated against Catholic churches since the draft Supreme Court opinion proposing to reverse Roe v. Wade was leaked in early May 2022, with many including graffiti with pro-abortion messages. Crucially, while a handful of the attacks have included thefts, the vast majority have only involved property destruction, indicating that the primary motive is not material gain.”
The motivation is to eradicate and the silence that results from these violent acts of intimidation is the barbarian’s accelerant.
If there had been more than 400 attacks on mosques in America over the past four years, do you think there would be general awareness of these events?
There would be, of course, and it would be warranted. The topic would dominate cable news shows and op-ed pages. There would be statements of interfaith solidarity and collections taken up at churches and synagogues. And that would be warranted as well.
For it is in these moments that people of every faith tradition or no faith tradition who share a common understanding that freedom of conscience is a basic tenet of living in a free society must stand up and be counted.
There is no such ecumenical response because the Catholic Church has proven to be defenseless in the face of the identitarian politics of the New Bolsheviks.
For reference, here is Dallas congresshuman Jasmine Crockett, one of the Socialist Spice Girls in the House, using Christianity to play boogeyman politics.
(video clip)
This is the ploy of every totalitarian; we must put them in a gulag before they put us in one.
But where are those faithful to peaceful pluralism?
Where were they after the FBI raid of a pro-life activist in rural Pennsylvania?
Where were they after the FBI’s Richmond Field Office targeted traditional Catholics who attend the Latin mass as possible domestic terrorists?
Where are they in the wake of the news of the U.S. Army characterizing pro-life organizations like the National Right to Life Committee as a possible domestic terrorist organization and Americans with “Choose Life” license plates as, again, possible domestic terrorists? This occurred during a briefing at Fort Liberty in North Carolina, the headquarters of the Army’s Special Operations Command.
American citizens exercising their God-given natural rights as enshrined in the Constitution are being smeared by elected officials for political gain and then turned over to federal law enforcement and the military for monitoring.
To say this is chilling doesn’t quite capture it, does it?
Since the Democrat Party has now gone full Soviet, it might be useful to consider the remarks of Soviet dissident and Nobel-Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said in speech he gave in 1983, “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
“Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”
We better soon remember not to forget God.