A Franciscan Catholic church in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, which was sold to a developer, was a near total loss after a fire broke out on Thursday, but police are mum on a possible cause.
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| Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Alegresses Church |
A massive fire reduced a Canadian church to ashes for the third time in less than a week.
Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses, a century-old Franciscan Catholic church in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, was a near total loss after a fire broke out on Thursday. The church, built in 1914, was not in use. It had been sold to developers, who planned to build 40 small apartments inside with additional units in the back of the building.
Nevertheless, the historic church blaze spread rapidly, and fire crews were not able to fully contain the flames, which resulted in extensive damage to the building, including one of its bell towers that collapsed.
Despite not being an active church, 11 Franciscan brothers were staying in a building connected to the back of the church but were able to get out in time before the blaze went out of control.
According to Father Guylain Prince, who oversees the local Franciscan congregation, the fire forced his 10 brothers from the scene.
“It was the only parish that was active (in the area) for more than 100 years by Franciscans, so it was we who built it. It contained frescoes by St. Francis, stained glass windows. It is a superb church, an extraordinary church,” Prince said, according to local media, which reported that the owner of the church is still “in shock” about what happened.
“We’re gonna sit down with the city authorities to see what we can do. This is not a standard building, it is a very special building,” said Georges Mouradian, the church’s new owner.
The official cause of the blaze is not fully known. Local police are mum on a possible cause.
In the span of a week, Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses is the third church to go up in flames in Canada.
Since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, have been burned to the ground, vandalized or defiled in Canada.
The church burnings started in 2021 after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools.
Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Jamil Jivani has urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down, saying the recent rash of destruction is a “very serious issue” that is a direct “attack” on families as well as “religious freedom in Canada.”
LifeSiteNews reported in August that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet said it will expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward documenting claims that hundreds of young children died and were clandestinely buried at now-closed residential schools, some of them run by the Catholic Church.
LifeSiteNews reported last week that Leah Gazan, backbencher MP from the New Democratic Party, brought forth a new bill that seeks to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system once operating in Canada was a “genocide.”
Canadian indigenous residential schools, run by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were set up by the federal government and were open from the late 19th century until 1996.
While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.
