Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Alegresses Church

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

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.

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. LifeSiteNews reported that one Catholic and Anglican church were destroyed.

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.

FBI Director Christopher Wray

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Wallace White

Republican Texas Rep. Lance Gooden is demanding the FBI answer questions about the alleged gaps in their recently released 2023 crime report that paints a misleading picture of crime, according to a letter provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gooden is joined by Republican Texas Rep. Randy Weber and Republican Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany in the letter questioning the FBI crime data’s validity, pointing to the agency’s past of “inaccurate claims” on crime by omitting certain department’s data from their numbers, according to the letter. The FBI data showed a 3% reduction in violent crime in 2023, which Gooden says in the letter “couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“Underreporting or misreporting crime statistics significantly impacts public perception and policy decisions, leading to a misunderstanding of crime trends, which causes unwarranted fear or complacency,” Gooden said in the letter. “Cherry-picking statistical data to deliberately mislead the public into thinking their community is safer than before would be an abhorrent act of ‘misinformation,’ especially considering the source of the misguided claim is an elite federal law enforcement agency.”

The letter asks several questions to the FBI, such as if they omitted any data from various major cities, how many agencies provided incomplete data and if the data would be retroactively adjusted to reflect an increase in violent crime, like it had in 2022 according to the Crime Prevention Research Center. In 2022, over 6,000 agencies did not report data to the FBI, accounting for 32% of all police departments in the U.S., according to the letter.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been touting the newly released data, saying that violent crime is at a “50-year low” and crediting their American Rescue Plan bill for the alleged decrease, according to a September White House press release. Most recently, the FBI published a quarterly report that reported for the first six months of 2024 that violent crime was down 10.3% compared to the first six months of 2023, according to an FBI press release.

However, the data only counted reports from 72% of law enforcement agencies, according to the press release. It is also unclear which agencies are omitted in the quarterly report.

Another survey of crime in the nation is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NVCS) carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which showed from 2021 to 2023, the NVCS reported a 36% increase in the violent crime victimization rate, according to the report. The UCR and the NVCS differed substantially, differing by over 45% in 2022, according to the Marshall Project in 2023.

“If key data about the actual criminal activity in our cities is missing, it has not been reflected in either your claim or the accompanying press release,” Gooden said in the letter. “A selective and deliberate omission of relevant and necessary context amounts to an inexcusable case of spreading ‘misinformation’ by an agency of the Federal government.”

The FBI didn’t immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.