President Joseph Biden’s Department of Justice has recommended against any jail time being handed down for Maeve Nota, who admits to vandalizing St. Louise Catholic Church in Bellevue, Washington, last June. She had been arrested and charged after smashing the church’s windows and doors, destroying a statue, spray-painting profane anti-Catholic messages and attacking one of the church’s workers. Damages amounted to over $30,000.
It was one of nearly 300 attacks on U.S. Catholic churches since May 2020, 118 of them since the May 2022 leak of the draft U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
This stance by the Biden administration reflects its political bias against Catholics and anyone who supports the Supreme Court ruling.
“In many ways, what we’re seeing is unprecedented,” Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, told the media, “and poses serious threats to the ability of Catholics to freely practice their faith — free from threats of vandalism, violence or even coercion from governmental actors.” Some 70 million people in the U.S. are Catholic.
What has been the FBI’s response? In February, its Richmond office recommended the agency infiltrate Catholic churches to find “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” citing the notoriously prejudiced Southern Poverty Law Center as a source for identifying nine Catholic “hate groups” to go after.
Surveilling and infiltrating these groups, the FBI decided, would be important in the run-up to the 2024 election. When the memo was leaked it created an uproar and the national FBI office disavowed it.
In July 2022 Biden directed his Justice Department to launch a “reproductive rights” task force, led by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, to strike back against the Supreme Court’s ruling. “The Court abandoned 50 years of precedent and took away the constitutional right to abortion,” Gupta told the media.
In fact, the court’s ruling recognized there was no basis for a right to abortion in the Constitution. It didn’t make a single woman’s decision to have an abortion illegal. “The court’s conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way,” it ruled, referring “that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
The Justice Department and FBI launched a flurry of probes against so-called pro-life supporters. On Sept. 23, Mark Houck, co-president of a Catholic men’s ministry and regular participant in protests outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia, became an FBI target and was arrested in a raid by at least 20 FBI agents in front of his children.
Two FBI agents showed up that same month to question a pro-life activist praying outside a Planned Parenthood office in St. Paul, Minnesota.
A week later the FBI arrested 11 pro-lifers, ranging from 24 to 87 years old, for their attempt to block the Carafem Health Center Clinic in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, 18 months earlier. Originally charged with misdemeanors, prosecutors convinced a federal grand jury to turn that indictment into felonies as violations under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
Under this act, signed into law in 1994 by former President Bill Clinton, first-time convictions of protesters in sit-in or blockage protests at reproductive health centers can be fined up to $10,000 and sent to prison for up to six months. This is a blow to the right to protest, regardless of your view on women’s rights, and a threat to the working class.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, the largest Catholic civil rights group, told Fox News Digital that attacks on the church were coming “from the Corporate 500, from the United States government, as well as from some state and local governments.”
He pointed to the Equality Act being promoted by liberals, under which public funding for Catholic hospitals would be pulled if they refused to perform abortions or sex reassignment surgeries. “When the government comes after you with their powers, it’s serious,” he said. “The church is not encroaching on the government, it’s the government encroaching on the churches, and it’s coming most viciously from the Biden administration.”