Over the past few months, six Brooklyn Roman Catholic Churches have been vandalized. Statues have been decapitated, broken and defaced, and in some instances hate mail has accompanied the desecrations.
In response, we contacted the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, asking the authorities to make these investigations a priority; the league also offered to assist in any way it could. On January 21, we took another step.
To help pay for the restoration of the vandalized statutes, the Catholic League made a contribution to each of the targeted churches: St. Jerome’s, Our Lady of Refuge, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Fortunata, and St. Rita’s.
From what we have learned, these crimes were not the act of wayward delinquents, rather they have all the markings of deliberate malice. Indeed, the fact that they occurred in the same New York borough where white-collar miscreants recently insulted Catholics with hate speech masked as art (the Brooklyn Museum of Art fiasco) suggests that anti-Catholic bigotry is alive and well in Brooklyn.
