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What you’re seeing is the rise of anticatholicism.
Definitely something that we as a society need to be more aware of. Anticatholicism has no place in society. Canadians at all levels need to take a stand against it.
We're not seeing the rise of anything new. Catholicism is just one line in the long list of 'oppressive structures' the woke vilify in fiction and history, like conservatism, meritocracy, western civilization, old white men and so on. This has nothing to do with the anticatholicism of the past based on anticlericalism or wasp-y fears of the pope's influence.
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Anti-christianity has been around awhile and is a big theme in media these days.
A recent example of this is the Yellowstone prequel 1923 with a graphic depiction of a native american girl being beaten and raped across a few episodes. When she lashes out at the nuns that did this to her and escapes, the evil priests go to track her down. The police that go to question her mother back on the reservation, kill the mother while searching the house. The show really goes out of its way to ascribe the worst of past events to the church. There is no sympathetic christian figure in the show. All are evil.
Anti-Christianity is one thing, but anti-catholicism is especially dangerous because of the places it leads to. I think we need to be specific about calling out anti-catholic sentiment, and yellowstone is a perfect example of it. That type of hateful depiction belongs in the KKK meetings of the 1920s where it came from, not in a mainstream television show. Imagine that it's 2023 and things like that are being pushed on mainstream TV. Insane how far backward we've gone.
I think this is hyperbolic.
I am reminded of that racist hoax from the UK that was discussed in the thread last month, about a suspiciously misspelt letter that was sent to some BAME Brit calling her a "Yoruba scum". This was a glaring red flag because No True Racist cares one whit what precise tribe of black she is. Whereas blacks care a great deal about what tribe of black they are; hence the false flag diagnosis.
Likewise, the 2020s Canadians who are vandalising churches are not going to care what sect of Christianity you're from. People who are trying to exact revenge for indigenous killings from people who are 100 years removed from a crime... that didn't even happen? If they're gonna smash up a church with such poor attention to detail on the temporal and factual aspects of responsibility, I hardly think they'll be splitting hairs on the theological distinctions.
Therefore I put it to you that making the distinction between anti-christian and anti-catholic will decrease your predictive power in the Canada case. You are not cleaving reality at the joints here, due to an inaccurate model of the mental state of the people doing church desecrations.
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These people seem to have no issue with pope Francis. It’s specifically the social conservative wing they have an issue with.
Anti-catholic rhetoric is still anti-catholic and has no place in any modern society. The rise of anticatholicism is dangerous and should be called out and stopped immediately whenever it's seen.
Dangerous how? For a long time, North America operated on definitely-not-Catholic-Christianity and has managed to come all this way (modulo a few wars), and there was indeed a time where Catholics were discriminated against for being such. However, in the US, the Catholic minorities have been assimilated into the greater civilizational project with no issue, and today, all of Christianity is regarded rather equally, for good and bad. Unless I am missing something here, "anti-Catholicism" seems like something that would have been more of a problem back when the Americas were first being colonized. (ETA: This is to say, maybe it's different in Canada, I dunno.)
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