In their remarkably ignorant and deceptive piece entitled "The Catholic Church in Canada is worth billions, a Globe investigation shows. Why are its reparations for residential schools so small?" published on August 7th in the Globe & Mail—historically and notoriously a trenchantly anti-Catholic paper (see: George Brown's anti-Catholicism)—Tavia Grant and Tom Cardoso stoke hatred and antipathy for the Catholic Church in the usual underhanded way. Not for the Feds behind the residential schools, mind you. Not for the other Christian sects who were involved. Just for the Catholic Church. Curious.
It is worth here noting that a number of the images used in the piece picture St. Michael's Cathedral in Toronto, which belongs to a dioceses that never ran or operated a residential school, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the residential schools. One caption reads:
"Toronto's St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica five-year restoration cost $128-million, giving the church a new organ, statues and painted ceiling, among other improvements. The work overlapped with a fundraising campaign for residential-school survivors that raised less than one-30th of that amount." First, the suggestion that Toronto Catholics bear any guilt is a libel for which Tavia and Tom or the section editor responsible should apologize, but likely will not. Second, that the Toronto diocese should spend money on maintaining a beloved, diverse, charitable, and hugely-popular cathedral is its business. It does not do so with money raised by Kamloops. It does not do so with money raised by White Horse. And if anything, that money would hardly be better spent on unwarranted monetary mea culpas. The placement of these photos and their juxtaposition to insinuate guilt is not only devious and deceitful, but further evidence of the Globe's persisting anti-Catholic hatred. Any spurious accusation or intimation is warranted so long as it serves the cause...
Tavia notes, to her credit, that unlike the the Anglican sect, the Holy Catholic Church operates on the ancient Roman diocesan system and is not nationalized or centralized in any sense. These dioceses don't share a common bank account. And despite this concession, she (and Cardoso presumably) go on to talk as if there were some exploitable goldmine; as if these dioceses and their funds were not partitioned and spread across ten provinces and three territories, each tied up with projects and properties that greatly improve Canadian communities (i.e. when the kind of people who'll relish Tavia and Tom's writing aren't burning the churches down).
Tavia and Cardoso gloss over the fact that the money presumed ripe for the taking, primarily by the legal hacks in the grievance industry—who regularly exploit misconstruences and revisionist histories—is majoritively earmarked for charitable causes and community engagement extra to paying the salaries of secretaries, counselors, and priests; for church renovations; for foreign missions; and for charitable endeavors the world round.
Like the great defamer Voltaire who had an ax to grind and no higher truth to serve, the hacky free-mason Gibbon whose false history many still regard as true despite having been soundly and recently disproven by secular historians, and like every anti-Catholic philosophe in one way or another responsible for the orgies of blood instigated by the Jacobins, Tavia and Tom start with the presumption of guilt: that the Church is responsible for the erosion of grave markers that comes with time (see: all the parish cemeteries in southern Ontario with markerless plots and nary a claim of genocide), for the diseases ubiquitous a century ago, and for the caprice of the federal government, which refused to bury or ship back the bodies of the ~0.2% of students who died prematurely—the supermajority of which perished from tuberculosis. They presume guilt and in this piece indicate what should be done: pillage the Church.
Tavia and Tom may have set the bar high in their King Street East office for their past reporting on asbestos and crime, respectively, but in the way of peddling thinly-veiled anti-Catholic slanders, bigotry, and hatred, at the Globe & Mail, they have big shoes to fill. In the way of smears and prompts to keep attacking the True Faith and its adherents, I imagine George Brown would at least respect this latest effort.