Historic Saint-Paul Catholic Church in Montreal destroyed by fire

MONTREAL, Quebec (LifeSiteNews) — A historic Catholic church in Montreal, Canada, was reduced to near rubble in a huge blaze, the cause of which investigators still have not determined.

The over 100-year-old Saint-Paul Catholic Church in Montreal, Quebec, went up in flames on February 23. A food bank next to it was also reduced to ashes. The church was built in 1910 and holds significant historical meaning for the local community.

While the church has been vacant for some time, about 148 people had to flee the area due to the flames, including over 70 seniors who lived in a nearby care home.

The cause of the church fire, say investigators, is not yet known; however, it comes at a time when arson attacks on Catholic churches in Canada have reached epidemic-like proportions.

Mayor of the local borough of Saint-Paul’s, Véronique Fournier, in a statement on social media, said the fire is “challenging for the residents of Côte-Saint-Paul” as the church has “special meaning” for those who live in the community.

Fournier said that they are still waiting on news from the Montreal Fire Service as to the cause of the blaze.

Hate-motivated attacks against Christians are on the rise in Canada. In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and false claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is, after four years, there have been no mass graves discovered at residential schools.

However, as the unfounded claims spread, since the spring of 2021, over 120 churches, most of them Catholic, many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population, have been burned to the ground, vandalized, or defiled in Canada.

The Canadian media has been rather silent on the church burnings, as has the ruling Liberal federal government.

Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, admitted that he has yet to meet with anyone from the over 123 Christian, mostly Catholic, churches that have been either reduced to ashes or seriously vandalized over the past four years.