FORT CHIPEWYAN, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) – One of the oldest standing Catholic churches in the Canadian province of Alberta was terrifyingly reduced to ashes late last week in what police are deeming a “suspicious” incident.
The destruction of yet another historic Catholic church in Canada happened last Thursday in the remote northern Alberta town of Fort Chipewyan. The fire saw the 113-year-old Catholic church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin reduced to nothing but its burned-out foundation. The church was built by the Oblate missionaries in 1909.
Police had been notified of the fire in the early morning hours on Thursday, and officers along with the Fort Chipewyan Fire Department as well as Alberta Forestry helped put the fire out before it spread to nearby buildings.
While officials have stated that the overall cause of the fire is not yet clear, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the inferno is being treated as “suspicious.”
“We do believe it suspicious,” RCMP spokesperson Corporal Troy Savinkoff told the media.
“But we’re still investigating to see what the potential cause of the fire is,” he added.
This time last year, Justin Trudeau and his media allies were at the forefront of falsely accusing Catholic institutions of having buried Indigenous children in mass graves at various residential schools across Canada.
There was and is no credible evidence to support these wild accusations, but many Canadians are still unaware of the facts.
SIGN to demand an apology from Justin Trudeau for promoting the "mass grave" smear
The anger generated by the media at home and abroad saw over twenty Canadian churches burned, and extensive damage done to many more, but the record has never been set straight in what amounts to a disinformation campaign.
Terry Glavin at the National Post recently wrote a masterful piece that may go down in history as the definitive “debunking” of the assertions about the mass graves that never were.
Glavin points out that “nothing new was added to the public record” concerning the history of residential schools in Canada.
“The legacy of the schools had already been exhaustively explored in the testimony of hundreds of elders and a series of inquiries, public hearings, criminal cases, settlements and federal investigations going back decades. Most important of these efforts were the widely publicized undertakings of the 2008-2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), and the content of its voluminous findings,” Glavin wrote.
“…[N]ot a single mass grave was discovered in Canada last year,” he added.
“The several sites of unmarked graves that captured international headlines were either already-known cemeteries, or they remain sites of speculation even now, unverified as genuine grave sites.”
“Not a single child” accounted for during the extensively researched commission “was located in any of these places,” Glavin underscored.
“In none of these places were any human remains unearthed.”
SIGN and SHARE the petition calling on Justin Trudeau to set the record straight.
Even Trudeau's kneeling at what was reported upon as a just-discovered residential school burial ground was a lie - it was actually a well-known Catholic cemetery, but the media didn't let these details get in the way of reinforcing their narrative.
Trudeau also called on Pope Francis to come to Canada and apologize for what had happened, as outlets like Reuters, the New York Times and scores more told the world that “nearly 1000 bodies” had been found in two mass graves.
Those online articles were quietly edited from "mass graves" to "unmarked graves", but we still have the Twitter posts from major outlets like Reuters to prove the staggering level of misinformation.
SIGN: Justin Trudeau must tell Canadians the truth - there were no mass graves
According to an extensive investigation by Professor Emeritus Jacques Rouillard from the Université de Montréal: “The ‘discovery’ was first reported last May 27 (2021) by Tk’emlúps te secwépemc First Nation Chief Rosanne Casimir after an anthropologist, Sarah Beaulieu, used ground-penetrating radar in a search for the remains of children alleged by some to be buried there.”
“Her preliminary report is actually based on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains.”
Professor Rouillard opined that the unverifiable narrative of what could have amounted to child-murder has led to the false assertion of genocide, an assertion without any supporting evidence.
“By never pointing out that it is only a matter of speculation or potentiality, and that no remains have yet been found, governments and the media are simply granting credence to what is really a thesis: the thesis of the ‘disappearance’ of children from residential schools,” Rouillard wrote.
“And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference.”
The vast majority of Canadians have been misled by the media and Mr. Trudeau, believing the most incredible smears imaginable, leading to scores of attacks on churches around the country.
It's time we heard the truth.
Please sign the petition today.
We are also cc'ing Canada's Catholic bishops on this petition - they must also demand the record be corrected, lest Canadians continue believing the mainstream media's disinformation.
For More Information:
How the world's media got it wrong on residential school graves - National Post
Trudeau lied about the bogus mass grave story - LifeSiteNews
Trudeau's narrative was a hoax - LifeSiteNews
**Photo: St. Jean Baptiste Church in Morinville burned to the ground on June 30, 2021**
RCMP have also said that there were no reported threats directed to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Church before the incident. There were no injuries reported and the investigation is ongoing.
Since the spring of 2021, over 100 churches, most of them Catholic, have either been burned or vandalized across Canada. The attacks on the churches came about shortly after the discovery of unmarked graves at now-closed residential schools once run by the Church in parts of Canada in the spring of last year.
Last year, the mainstream media ran with the inflammatory claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools.
This resulted in mass church burnings across Canada.
First Nation Chief: People should not take their ‘frustration and anger and disappointment on the house of the Lord’
Allan Adam, the First Nation Chief for Athabasca Chipewyan, live-streamed the fire on his Facebook page. In the video, Adam could be seen helping firefighters put out the blaze.
A visibly disturbed Adam said with the sound of fire in the background, “Over 100 years in history, gone up in flames.”
“This was uncalled for. This was a beautiful church.”
In a statement sent to APTN News, Adam said that people should not take their “frustration and anger and disappointment on the house of the Lord.”
“A lot of history went through there, a lot of our elders’ memories are in my head will only be there now because every time I walk across there won’t be a church standing there,” Adam noted.
The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) released a statement concerning the church fire.
“ACFN Chief and Council are saddened by the loss of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church in Fort Chipewyan,” the statement said.
“The church, built in 1909, has been a part of the community for over one hundred years, and even though the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Roman Catholic Church is complicated the loss of the church will be deeply felt in the community.”
Canada’s Residential School system was a structure of boarding schools funded by the Canadian government that ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.
Some schools were run by Catholic religious orders that had settled in Canada. While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the past wrongs led to anti-Catholic sentiment, which exploded last summer after the discovery of the “unmarked” graves in Kamloops, British Columbia.
When it comes to the reported discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School, recent emerging evidence undermines the mainstream media and government narrative that the Catholic Church was secretly burying children.
In July, Pope Francis made an Apostolic “pilgrimage” to Canada, visiting exclusively first nations peoples in Alberta and Quebec. While in Quebec, he joined a pagan “smudging” ritual before he gave a lengthy speech where he conveyed “deep shame and sorrow” for the role played by Catholic Church members in government-funded residential school abuses.
The Pope made the apology even though the fact a recent investigation from January 2022 found that despite the allegations of “physical genocide” on the part of the Church, no graves have been found.
Canadian Catholic prelates have continued to comply with media and government pressure to apologize for the church’s roles in the residential school system.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last year waited weeks before acknowledging the church vandalism, and when he did speak, he said it is “understandable” that churches have been burned, also saying it is “unacceptable and wrong.” He later also demanded that Pope Francis apologize.
The Kamloops school was financed by the Canadian government. Reports from the past show how the Canadian government ignored reports from 1907 that the schools were in “prime conditions” for the “outbreak of epidemics.”
However, the reality of the situation is that the first “unmarked graves” might have only been “depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school.”
Also, the death records themselves from the Residential Schools after a government investigation showed that the unmarked graves where burials took place were claimed to have been accounted for and were not exclusively used for only native Canadians.