On Sunday, June 9, 2024, the historic St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto, and its many artifacts and precious paintings, were “completely destroyed” in a blaze, to quote Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop. The torched church’s pastor, Rev. Don Beyers, added that the congregation is “greatly devastated”:
I’m crushed, I feel for my people. You can’t imagine what this is like for a church community to come on Sunday morning to find that everything you worked so hard for and done so much for [is] gone in the matter of an hour.
Authorities said “The fire has not been deemed criminal in nature yet,” thereby implying no foul play.
This may seem to be a reasonable conclusion, at least for those unaware that Canada—not Egypt or Nigeria—has fast become the world’s epicenter of arson attacks on churches. Over the last two-and-a-half years, over 100 churches have been vandalized, torched, or desecrated in the “Great North” (mapped and listed here).