The many cases of anti-Catholic vandalism have been documented by me here at GetReligion in recent years. Also well-documented have been how many professionals in the mainstream media keep overlooking such criminal activities.

These incidents — even as 2021 came to an end and now weeks into 2022 — just keep happening, yet they continue to be given little to no mainstream news coverage. It seems, at times, as if violence against religious groups — be they Catholics or otherwise — is a subject that isn’t worthy of coverage. This trend is also a lesson on how the press uses language, what terms journalists use to describe crimes and whether the story lasts just a day or for weeks and months.

Journalists also need to start asking: What are the motivations for these kinds of attacks?

A Catholic priest, parishioners and Catholic schoolchildren were among the dozens injured on Nov. 21 when authorities said Darrell E. Brook, driving an SUV, allegedly plowed into marchers during a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisc. Six people were killed.

The incident would get additional attention for its inability to get widespread national media coverage. Accusations quickly emerged that key facts didn’t fit the dominant media narrative.

Truth is, not all hate crimes are created equal. Crimes against Catholic churches are routinely ignored by national news outlets. We can also see a troubling journalism trend at work in coverage of the recent anti-Semitic attack against a Texas house of worship.

The gun-wielding suspect in that Jan. 15 synagogue attack, British citizen Malik Faisal Akram, took Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

The standoff with FBI agents was an act of terrorism and resulted in Akram’s death. National news coverage was intense during the standoff — but soon evaporated.

The two incidents — the synagogue attack and the Waukesha attack — are similar in some ways.

Both took place on a Saturday night and had obvious religious angles. The lack of consistent news coverage prompted journalists in conservative media to note that the synagogue attack was no accident — much like the Waukesha massacre. I also see a connection here to coverage, or lack of coverage, of the ongoing attacks against Catholic churches (something that saw a spike in 2020) and the lack of coverage they have received from the likes of large national dailies such as The New York Times, Washington Post or USA Today.

David Harsanyi, a senior writer for the conservative National Review magazine, highlighted the following point:

Akram’s presence in a Jewish house of worship on the Sabbath was no accident. One woman watching the stream of the service told the Washington Post that the hostage-taker admitted to choosing the synagogue because the United States “only cares about Jewish lives.” Akram allegedly forced the rabbi of Beth Israel to call another rabbi in New York so she could exert influence to get Siddiqui released. The belief that Jews are members of a giant cabal that shares power over government is one of the most enduring and popular antisemitic tropes.

So, you can’t really blame some Jews for being perturbed at the FBI, recently charged with keeping an eye on “domestic terrorists” who challenge school-board members, for initially contending that the Texas synagogue attack was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Or, our suddenly judicious president, who only last week was smearing anyone who refused to support his power grab as a white supremacist, for now saying, “I don’t think there is sufficient information to know about why he targeted that synagogue or why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been in prison for over 10 years, why he was engaged — why he was using antisemitic and anti-Israeli comments. I — we just don’t have enough facts.”

Harsanyi was quick to call what the press and authorities did “reserved for certain politically inconvenient crimes.”

Everyone knows well what will happen the next time a white male commits anything resembling a politically motivated act. The media still seem to think every conservative is somehow culpable for January 6, while liberals will never be asked to answer for the terrorist who attempted to massacre the entire Republican leadership on June 14, 2017, or for the widespread rioting of 2020.

The Jewish press — like the work of so often Catholic newsrooms in similar instances — provided plenty of valid and important stories in the ensuing days.

Yes, language matters here as does the scope of coverage.

Silence matters, as well.

This brings us to the vandalism that continues to plague Catholic churches, and not just in the United States. These attacks are also on the rise in Europe and in South America.

This trend has been largely ignored — as I have noted several times in recent years — in much of the mainstream press. Why is this the case? There are many possible reasons, as legacy media become more partisan in the digital age.

Daily Compass, a Catholic news internet site with Italian and Spanish editions, posted a piece on Jan. 19 under the headline, “Desecrated churches: a surge of violence from France to America.” This is how the piece opens:

A tsunami of vandalism is hitting the churches of France, amidst the silence of the media and ironic declarations of the government. After a number of churches were burnt down in Canada last June, the wave of violence, sacrilege, and desecration of Catholic churches in the USA and Latin American countries has not abated. Omertà, i.e. the code of silence, connivance, and complicity on the part of governments and the national and international mass media show just how violent anti-Christianity is becoming.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan's public denunciation of 14 January, regarding 'Religious Freedom Day' in the United States, taken up by almost all English-language Catholic newspapers, in which he denounced the staggering number of attacks on Christian places of worship over the last two years, has caused a sensation: "For nearly two years, the bishops of the United States have reported a disturbing trend of Catholic churches being vandalized and statues destroyed...," he said, recalling how "an attack on a place of worship is certainly an assault on the particular community that gathers there. It is also an attack on the founding principle of America as a place where all people can freely practice their faith".

It is no coincidence that young Madeline Cramer has been arrested and charged with hate crimes for vandalizing the doors of Denver Cathedral last October, while investigations are still under way to identify who was behind the decapitation of the statue of the Virgin Mary, which caused irreparable damage to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington on 5 December.

The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was the subject of another political protest that bordered on sacrilege on the eve of the annual National March for Life. This protest took on more resonance given that the U.S. Supreme Court could very well overturn Roe v. Wade after hearing arguments last year.

America, the Jesuit-run magazine known for its left-leaning stances on several cultural and political issues, is where I first read about the desecration. Here’s how America described it, with reporting from Religion News Service and Catholic News Service:

Using a projector located across the street, Catholics for Choice illuminated the facade of the basilica with messages such as “Pro-choice Catholics you are not alone,” “Stop stigmatizing; Start listening,” “Mi cuerpo, mi decision” (“My body, my decision” in Spanish) and the words “Pro-choice Catholics” within a Christian cross, Religion News Service reported.

Another projection stated, “1 in 4 abortion patients is Catholic.” (In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 24 percent of women who obtain abortions identify as Catholic.)

Jamie Manson, the head of the organization, posted on Twitter on Friday that the goal of the protest was not to change minds about abortion rights but to make a statement.

“We wanted to name a truth that always gets lost during the March for Life: the majority of Catholics are pro-choice & many practicing Catholics have abortions,” she wrote. “We wanted our voices to be heard and emboldened.”

Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, condemned the protest.

“The true voice of the Church was only to be found within The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception last evening,” he said in a statement. “There, people prayed and offered the Eucharist asking God to restore a true reverence for all human life. Those whose antics projected words on the outside of the church building demonstrated by those pranks that they really are external to the Church and they did so at night.”

Cardinal Gregory’s statement, disseminated widely by the Diocese of Washington, received little coverage in the mainstream press. Then again, the fact that he had tested positive for COVID-19 a few weeks got plenty of ink.

This is yet another example of warped journalistic priorities in 2022, in which some news events gain precedence over others in an ever-fractured news landscape.

FIRST IMAGE: Photo courtesy of history page at the Congregation Beth Israel website.