With high-profile attacks on Catholic churches & organizations on the rise over the past two years, advocates have grown frustrated with what they say is a lack of consequences for people who target Catholics compared to other religions or minority groups.
In Washington state, the Justice Department last month recommended no jail time for a transgender person who defaced church property and assaulted a church employee.In Washington, D.C., a man who destroyed the statues of three saints at a Catholic school appears to have pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor that allowed him to avoid serving his prison sentence.
The Religious Freedom Institute reported attacks at 174 Catholic sites between May 2020 and September of last year.CatholicVote, a Catholic advocacy group, says there have been 324 attacks on Catholic churches since May 2020. What police departments need, he said, is resources from the federal government to combat clear instances of hate crimes.
Prosecutors in the nation’s capital, who often decline to prosecute other types of crime, appear to have allowed the man to plead guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge, according to court documents, and then allowed the one week the man spent behind bars during his case to exempt him from any further jail time.
In the case of the San Francisco-area church, the five people who splashed red paint on a statue of St. Junipero Serra before tearing it to the ground in 2020 initially faced felony charges. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone at the time called the charges a “breakthrough moment for Catholics” because, he said, so few people who target symbols of Christian faith face felonies.
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