ABSTRACT
On the evening of July 11, 2020, a statue of the Virgin Mary at St. Peter’s Church in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester was set ablaze with the aid of a bouquet of plastic flowers. It was not the first time that the area had witnessed anti-Catholic violence. Attacks on religious symbols had been on the rise since at least 2016, prompting Boston Police to investigate whether the assault classified as hate crime. Anti-Catholicism is, of course, not an American invention. Nor was it particular to the modern age or confined to symbolic gestures. At the dawn of the twentieth century, an estimated 266 million people across the globe belonged to the Catholic Church. The attacks on Catholicism symbolically culminated in the dismantling of the pope’s temporal power, first by Revolutionary and then by Napoleonic France. And it was not just in Europe that the Catholic Church was battling its demons.
