President Donald Trump said his administration will “take a look” at a recent Catholic Church attack as part of its commitment to “eradicating anti-Christian bias” nationwide.
EWTN’s Owen Jensen pressed Trump Monday on what action his administration is taking following the vandalism of St. Patrick’s Church in Wichita, Kansas, over the weekend.
Last Saturday’s desecration of the Catholic Church resulted in the breaking of a statue, the burning of an American flag, candles damaged, a window smashed and a Satanic website was reportedly scrawled on the wall.
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“Church officials in Kansas called it a hate crime,” Jensen said, mentioning Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of Justice to establish a task force dedicated to “eradicating anti-Christian bias.” The reporter asked: “What more can the White House do to protect places of worship like St. Patrick’s Church?”
“We’re going to take a look,” Trump vowed. “I love Wichita. … I got big votes there. We won that state by a lot. We’ll take a look at that.”
When Trump requested that Jensen clarify when the attack took place, the reporter reiterated the damage the church sustained. The president commented, “I think it’s a terrible thing,” and doubled down on his intention to “take a look at it.”
The Wichita Police Department announced Sunday morning that it had arrested a 23-year-old suspect from Saline County in connection with the attack. The unnamed suspect was booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on charges of burglary, criminal damage to property and criminal desecration.
Though the suspect could potentially face hate crime charges in the future, the department stated that Kansas law does not “have a Hate Crime statute considered separate from other criminal statutes.” Therefore, hate crime charges are “considered later in the process and not something we can add when arresting an individual.”
The executive order signed by Trump two weeks after taking office directed a special task force to “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society, and to move Heaven and Earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide.”
A tracker compiled by the advocacy group CatholicVote since May 2020, when unrest first broke out in the U.S. following the death of George Floyd in police custody, has documented 492 attacks on Catholic churches and institutions in the past five years.
Attacks on all types of churches, including Catholic houses of worship, intensified after Politico published a leaked draft decision in May 2022 indicating that U.S. Supreme Court justices were prepared to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
The attacks on churches, which also targeted pro-life pregnancy centers, continued after the Supreme Court published the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
