A Catholic church in New Haven, Connecticut, Thursday morning was found defaced with Satanic symbols, according to church leadership.
The church, which houses the congregation of St. Mary’s, where the Catholic lay order the Knights of Columbus was founded, was vandalized between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., John Paul Walker, the church’s pastor, wrote in a Facebook post. Walker reported that “words and various symbols including a satanic one were painted on the outside doors of the church.”
Walker added that the church will remain closed while it is cleaned and blessed.
“I would ask everyone in the parish to pray to Our Lord in reparation for this sacrilege, and to St. Michael for protection against all the powers of hell,” he said. “Please pray, too, for the perpetrator of this action, who is clearly a very disturbed individual in need of serious help.”
The actual building that was vandalized, St. Joseph’s, has been St. Mary’s temporary home since 2019 when the parish undertook a major renovation project in the main church. The Knights were founded in Saint Mary’s basement in 1881 to combat anti-Catholicism in the United States. Over the years, the parish has endured a series on attacks, and throughout much of its early history it was referred to as a “blemish” on New Haven’s otherwise non-Catholic population, according to the organization’s institutional history.
The vandalism done at St. Mary’s is the latest in a rash of anti-Catholic attacks in the past week. On Saturday, a man in Ocala, Florida, set fire to a church while people were preparing for mass within. He later told police that he did it because of his serious disagreements with Catholicism and that he was on a “mission.” In both New York City and Boston, which have large Catholic populations, statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary were defaced, and in the case of the one in Boston, set on fire.
Around the same time, a church in California founded by the Junipero Serra, a canonized Catholic saint who has become controversial during the past few months of protests, burned severely in a fire Saturday morning. Authorities have not been able to determine whether or not the burning was arson.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to St. Mary’s for comment.
