Was the Minneapolis shooting an anti-Catholic hate crime?

“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, standing near the scene of yesterday’s Catholic school shooting in his city. “These kids were literally praying.” I think he was trying to say: “This is no time for empty platitudes” – or something similar. The words sounded horribly glib, though.

Of course, the killing of children distresses all good people, and Mayor Frey should be forgiven for an emotional outburst. There is something telling, however, about his kneejerk hostility towards the natural religious response to horror; his instinctive rage against the idea of a God who lets evil happen.

For a certain sort of metropolitan Democrat, Christianity is the impediment to, not the root of, justice. The secular liberal brain is trained to see Roman Catholicism, in particular, as wrong and harmful and needing to be stopped.

From what we think we know about the unhappy mind of the suspected killer, a boy called Robert Westman who wanted to be a girl called Robin Westman, it seems the same hostility – relatively harmless in a politician such as Frey – turned into something far darker. In an image widely shared on social media, we see what appears to be the machine-gun magazine clip he used to kill two children and injure 17 more. “Where is your God?” is scrawled on the side. Westman, who went on to kill himself, had reportedly attended the Annunciation Catholic School – and his mother attended Mass at the affiliated Annunciation Catholic Church – that he decided to attack.

FBI Director Kash Patel has said his agency is investigating the shooting as “an act of domestic terrorism and hate-crime targeting Catholics.” Others argue that it is a mistake to confuse nihilism with politics or anti-religious ideology. Westman’s social media scrawlings suggest a warped, manically depressed and insanely incoherent outlook.

Yet western liberal loathing of Catholicism, which taps into a more traditional American Protestant phobia, has intensified in recent years. Today, mentally-ill people often latch on to that hatred in a violent way. Since May 2020, some 400 Catholic churches have been attacked. “Incidents include arson, statues beheaded, limbs cut, smashed, and painted, gravestones defaced with swastikas and anti-Catholic language and American flags next to them burned, and other destruction and vandalism,” according to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. In June this year, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, the chairman of the conference’s Committee for Religious Liberty, wrote to Congressional leaders urging them to provide more funds for the protection of religious places of worship. Earlier this month, a vandal smashed windows and set fire to the door of the Christ the King Catholic Church in Flint, Michigan.

Catholics in America don’t expect or demand special protected-community status and no Christian wants to see sacred spaces turned into security zones. But there can be no denying that, as the latest reports suggest that American Catholicism is now entering a period of renewed growth, we are witnessing a concomitant outbreak of virulent anti-Catholicism in the land of the free. It’s an issue that the first American Pope might address in the coming days.

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