(ANALYSIS) There have been many big stories on the Catholic beat since I started contributing to GetReligion in November 2018.

Over the last five years, I have written about Catholicism as it related to doctrinal fights, politics, education and even sports. In between, we had a pandemic. Brother, has it been a busy time.

Over that time, I looked at mainstream news coverage regarding these issues and the growing importance of Catholic news media in the digital age. Catholic media is crucial, in large part, because of the many important religion stories that way to many elite mainstream newsrooms are ignoring.

No story has been bigger — in terms of both importance and reader interest — than church fires.

Churches have been targeted in the United States and around the world in what has easily been one of the most underreported (in some cases not reported at all) stories of the last decade. The problem? When it comes to press coverage, not all religious sanctuaries are created equal.

In my final post here at GetReligion, let’s take a look back at this trend.

In terms of news, the biggest was not an act of arson, but an accident. It was on April 15, 2019 that a structural fire broke out in the roof space of Notre Dame in Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral and one of the biggest symbols of Christianity throughout the world.  

By the time the fire was extinguished, the 12th century gothic house of worship’s spire had collapsed, its famed rose window destroyed, most of its roof wiped out and its upper walls severely damaged.     

I was in my office at The King’s College in New York City when I saw the news alerts. I had already filed a post for GetReligion — ironically! — regarding a rash of fires at churches across France during Lent.

That new post — with quick rewriting by me and speed editing by tmatt (who was across the hall on that day) — went online while the fire was still burning. It instantly went viral.

Here’s how that went down, as recounted by a tmatt post the following day:

Here at GetReligion, my colleague Clemente Lisi had, days earlier, written a feature about the recent series of fires and acts of vandalism at French churches. Lisi and I quickly rewrote the top of that post and put it up about 3 p.m. EDT yesterday. The headline: “If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?” So far, about 22,000 people have read that post.

The Notre Dame fire proved to be an accident — not set like in so many other cases — but the same questions persisted about lack of news coverage in the case of so many of these churches.

In Notre Dame’s case, there was plenty of coverage. It was that coverage, however, that was rife with what proved once again the inability of many journalists to understand basic facts about faith.

One of the most glaring mistakes to come out of the Notre Dame fire news coverage was a New York Times blunder regarding the mystery of a small statue of Jesus. It featured prominently in the Times story on Father Jean-Marc Fournier, the Paris Fire Department chaplain who risked his life to save many of Notre Dame prized relics.

It should be noted that Notre Dame doesn't have a Jesus statue — at least not one small enough to be taken out by an elderly priest. The “statue” appeared in no other news accounts and the Times story was the only one not to mention efforts to preserve the Blessed Sacraments from a side altar.

The New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari, a practicing Catholic, first flagged on Twitter, the social platform now known as X, that Fournier had actually saved “the Body of the Christ” — a phrase that Times editors interpreted as a small statue of Jesus. Honest. That was printed.

Now there is a correction on that story indicating "an earlier version of this article misidentified one of two objects recovered from Notre-Dame by the Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier. It was the Blessed Sacrament, not a statue of Jesus.”

The Blessed Sacrament (also known as the Eucharist or Holy Communion) is bread and wine from Jesus’ Last Super turned into what Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ.

It was a notable error and another example of the very secular nature of elite media East Coast newsrooms and most of the people who work in them. If there had ever been any doubt about this thesis before, this mistake was proof that journalists today (and over the course of GetReligion’s 20 years) just don’t — all together now — “get” religion.

After all, noting blind spots of this kind was part of the mission of GetReligion. I am very proud of the work I did in my five years here. As mentioned, I have covered a large array of topics and issues. Nonetheless, I still consider my highlighting the destruction of churches — when many others would not — to be my most important GetReligion work.

Even all these years later, this destruction persists. Despite little to no mainstream news coverage, U.S. Catholic bishops on January 16 issued a report that, among other things, pointed out the threat of church vandalism by both left- and right-wing extremists.

The 48-page report, issued annually by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, highlighted the threats to Catholic teachings in regard to migrants, what it called the “suppression of religious speech up-holding marriage and sexual difference” and defending religious freedom.

Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, who leads the USCCB Committee for Religious Liberty that compiled the report, said in a statement that Catholics play “a vital role to play in defending religious freedom and promoting the common good.” He added the following:

“Alongside the great work that many other Catholic and religious liberty organizations are doing, I pray that this report helps raise awareness of the threats to our first freedom here in America, and that it helps Catholics and all people of goodwill contribute to the common good of these United States.”

The report received no mainstream news coverage. Words like “religious freedom” must have scared them away.

Instead, Catholic media — on the doctrinal left and right — covered the report in basic news coverage. This is what Catholic News Agency reported the following:

After a year of renewed attacks on churches and religious centers, the U.S. bishops said in a new report released today that attacks on houses of worship constitute the “largest threat to religious liberty in 2024” and could threaten “the very lives of people of faith.”

Titled the “State of Religious Liberty in the United States,” the report is released annually by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee for Religious Liberty.

The report said that while the committee “was founded in response to increasing legal threats to the free exercise of religion,” the bishops felt “compelled to decry foreseeable threats to the very lives of people of faith here in the United States.”

“There is no greater threat to religious liberty than for one’s house of worship to become a place of danger, and the country sadly finds itself in a place where that danger is real,” the bishops said in the report.

At the same time, churches in Canada have also sustained attacks in recent years.

London’s Daily Mail newspaper reported the following on January 14:

Almost 100 Christian churches in Canada have been systematically targeted in apparent revenge attacks following a hoax about mass graves containing Native American children.

In 2021, a horrific story swept the internet as an indigenous group in Saskatchewan claimed to find 751 unmarked graves under the Marieval Indian Residential School, weeks after 215 children were supposedly discovered under another school in British Columbia.

The schools were run by Christian churches - largely Catholic - and sought to eliminate their students' Indigenous culture so they could 'assimilate' into Canadian society.

However, excavations carried out last year failed to turn up any evidence of bodies, and most experts concluded that claims of mass graves were exaggerated.

At the same time the excavations failed for the past two years, at least 96 churches have been burned, vandalized and destroyed, seemingly in retaliation, with phrases smeared on the walls including: 'Where are the children.'

The root cause of the apparent hoax stems from the early 19th to 20th centuries, when tens of thousands of indigenous children were ripped from their families and placed at 'residential' boarding schools across Canada.

Many suffered horrendous abuse, were killed or disappeared, leading to searches in recent years that claimed to find shallow graves through the use of ground-penetrating radar.

The tech only found aberrations in the ground that were mistakenly believed to be shallow graves, that may also have been rocks and tree roots disturbing the soil. 

Although not every 'site' has been excavated, no bodies were discovered at those that have, leading some to now feel outrage at the 'mass graves' may have been fueled more by social media hysteria than evidence.

There’s a lot to unravel in that’s story’s opening paragraphs. I’m sure many of you didn’t know about either the fires and the false premise those attacks had been perpetrated under. Why? Who has covered that important story?

Again, church attacks — be it arson or other desecrations — remains an underreported crime story. There are news sources doing great work in this regard. Make those part of your daily news diet since you won’t be reading about any of it in the legacy press.   

This post was originally published at GetReligion.

Clemente Lisi is the executive editor of Religion Unplugged. He previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on X @ClementeLisi.