Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

The 'Kristallnacht' of Christianity

Reading a National Post story recently about how federal lawyers asked Anglican churches in the British Columbia Diocese of Cariboo to provide a list of jewels and paintings they own to be applied against the cost of lawsuits filed by former students of an aboriginal residential school, the image that came to mind is that of the Nazis rounding up German Jews on Kristallnacht, demanding inventories of their valuables.

Bud Smith, a lawyer for the diocese, which has already been bankrupted by the lawsuits, commented to fellow Church members: "I don't know what kind of paintings you've got squirrelled away in your basements. The only jewelry we have is the bishop's ring, and one would hope the government won't take the bishop's ring."

Some parishioners suggested sending children's paintings from Sunday school classes to Ottawa.

Of course the apparent ignorance of the Ottawa lawyers about the typical financial estate of churches is tragically hilarious.

Presumably, they have assimilated mythological folklore about the supposed material riches of the Roman Catholic Church, and are a bit confused about the distinction between RC and Anglican, although these days the notion of churches holding treasure vaults of jewels and paintings is no less a hoot when applied to a Roman Catholic context.

However, just as there was a rampant mythology about "Jewish gold" in pre-war Nazi Germany, so there is about Christian churches among the neo-pagans of post-Christian culture. In short, Christians are Jews to the new Nazis of secularist anti-religion.

The final solution to the "Christian problem" is to ridicule, denigrate, marginalize, and where possible persecute Christianity at every opportunity. After all, Christians are just pathetic, deceived, intellectually stifled, flat-earthers bent on ramming their superstitious agenda down everyone else's throats, n'est ce pas? They must be stopped!

What better way than to bankrupt them and confiscate their equity on the pretext of reparations for human rights abuses? The residential school issue has provided the anti-Christian establishment in Ottawa with a convenient big spiked stick to beat on Christians with.

The Chretien Liberals have contrived to name churches as co-defendants in some of roughly 6,400 lawsuits over abuses and "cultural genocide" allegedly perpetrated at residential schools run by the Roman Catholic, United, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches. New torts are being filed at the rate of 40 a month.

As a National Post editorial asserted: "The federal government of Canada is a party to a systematic and egregious attack on the institutions of Christianity."

Also writing in that paper, David Frum, who is Jewish, noted that: "There are precedents for such a massive forced sale of religious property in Russia, in Mexico and in Spain. But nothing like it has occurred in an English-speaking country since Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries 500 years ago."

Never mind that the aboriginal residential school system was sanctioned and approved by democratically elected Canadian federal governments of the day, and assented to by the voting public.

The philosophy behind aboriginal assimilationist policies may have become ideologically unfashionable, but it was conceived at the time (1879) in good faith by the government, the voting public, and the churches, as enlightened and progressive, and it requires no apology, much less legal and financial redress. The current witch hunt is an exercise in crass and cynical revisionism.

As recently as 1969, a Liberal Indian affairs minister named Jean Chretien released a government white paper proposing abolition of distinct legal status for native people. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau publicly affirmed at the time that his government intended to end aboriginal status as "a race apart" and transform them into "Canadians of full status."

"We won't recognize aboriginal rights," Trudeau continued, adding that "perhaps the treaties shouldn't go on forever. It's inconceivable, I think, that in a given society one section of the society should have a treaty with the other." Tragically, both Chretien and Trudeau, in deference to political correctness, subsequently backed away from their visionary initiative.

As Anglican Bishop John Clarke, of Athabasca, in northern Alberta, told the Anglican Journal: "There's a whole pile of upper middle class guilt here that's running the show, and not much common sense."

The Church members who faithfully attended services and in many cases made significant financial sacrifices over many years to support the churches' work, and to maintain local church buildings, are in no way culpable by any rational measure for what may or may not have gone on in residential schools, but they are the ones who are being made to suffer the most in this execrable anti-Christian pogrom.

Banefully, many leaders of lawsuit-beleaguered churches have turned quisling, cooperating with the Ottawa Gestapo by falling all over themselves and each other conceding "guilt" before the cases ever go to court.

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