Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.
(LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic church in Portland, Oregon was vandalized with pro-abortion graffiti this past weekend in what has become a common occurrence in the United States since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Parishioners at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church discovered that its doors and sidewalk were spray painted with the message “F*CK U: My Body, My Choice” before Mass on April 28.
The Church has reportedly been attacked twice previously, once in June 2021 and again in July 2021 during a crime wave carried out on four Catholic churches in Portland over a six-week period that summer.
Breaking: Those attending mass this morning at St. Patrick’s Church in northwest Portland, Ore. arrived to find it had been vandalized again with a pro-abortion message. (The door is still stain-bleached of a removed hateful message.) Multiple Christian houses of worship have… pic.twitter.com/YqPlP4LMOW
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 28, 2024
Oregon currently allows for abortion up until birth. It’s ultra-liberal cities and permissive drug and social policies have prompted grassroots conservatives to start a “Greater Idaho movement” that seeks to have 12 of the state’s easternmost counties secede and join neighboring Idaho.
Father Timothy Furlow has been the pastor at the church since 2018. He addressed the attack in his Sunday sermon. He said that while he knows the identity of the person who carried it out, he does not want parishioners to seek vengeance or have hatred toward them.
“You probably saw the graffiti on the way in,” he stated. “Somebody said, ‘Oh we gotta cover this up.’ I’m like, ‘Nope, I want them to see that.’ And the reason is because it fits kind of perfectly with what the core message of the Gospel is.”
CatholicVote.org reported that there has been over 400 attacks on Catholic churches in the U.S. since 2020 and that St. Patrick’s marks the 252nd such instance since May 2022. CatholicVote’s “Violence Tracker” states that 27 attacks have occurred in 2024 alone and that of only 25 percent of cases end in an arrest.
The website also found that the top 10 states with the most attacks on Catholic churches are California (55), New York (46), Pennsylvania (25), Texas (22), Colorado (17), New Jersey (17), Ohio (16), Florida (16), Massachusetts (16), and Oregon (15).
St. Patrick’s is the oldest Catholic church in the greater Portland area. According to its website, its cornerstone was laid on St. Patrick’s Day in 1889 and was dedicated to him in 1891.
LifeSiteNews has reported on dozens of attacks carried out against Catholic and non-Catholic churches in the United States as well as in Canada and Europe in recent years. Thanks to whistleblower Kyle Seraphin, the FBI under Joe Biden was revealed to have targeted pro-lifers and to have spied on Traditional Catholics in multiple states under the pretext that they shared political views that effectively made them domestic terrorists. Countless Catholic clergy, media, and political leaders decried the FBI’s tactics, arguing that they could result in violence.