MORINVILLE, Alberta (LifeSiteNews) — Parishioners are returning to an Edmonton-area church that has been rebuilt after being burned to the ground in 2021.
In December, St. Jean Baptiste Parish in Morinville, Alberta, welcomed over 300 Catholics for its official reopening ceremony led by Bishop Gary Franken, following four years of rebuilding after arsonists burned it down.
“It was a really joyful moment for our parish,” parish pastor Fr. Trini Pinca told the Catholic Register. “And of course, for me, especially as a pastor, after enduring four years and a half of not having a church, moving from one school to another, maybe sometimes in the rectory, and not being able to decorate and celebrate.”
The newly restored church includes vivid paintings of Christ’s life, including his Baptism at the River Jordan by St. John the Baptist. The new church also contains stain-glassed windows donated by a Sherwood Park and four bells from a church in Quebec City.
In an interview with CBC News, Pinca compared the rebuilding of the parish to a phoenix rising over the ashes, saying, “One message that I have received after the fire was a message from my bishop back in the Philippines, and he just mentioned about the image of the phoenix rising.”
“For me, that’s been the life here in our parish,” he declared.
The reopening of St. Jean Baptiste Parish comes after the parish was burned to the ground on June 30, 2021, in a series of attacks against Catholic churches across Canada.
Beginning in 2021, the mainstream media ran with the unproven claim that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools. Since then, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in apparent retribution.
Instead of correcting the claims, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Liberal politicians and the mainstream media seem to have sympathized with those destroying churches, as evidenced by CBC report which appears to justify the church burnings.
In fact, in 2021, Trudeau waited weeks before acknowledging the church vandalism, and when he did speak, said it is “understandable” that churches have been burned while acknowledging it to be “unacceptable and wrong.”
Similarly, in February, Liberal and NDP MPs quickly shut down a Conservative motion to condemn an attack against a Catholic church in Regina, Saskatchewan. The motion was shut down even though there was surveillance footage of a man, who was later arrested, starting the fire.
Additionally, last October, Liberal and NDP MPs voted to adjourn rather than consider a motion that would denounce the arson and vandalism against 83 Canadian churches, especially those within Indigenous communities.