Buenos Aires cathedral / guillermo_celano/Shutterstock

ACI Prensa Staff, Aug 30, 2021 / 15:10 pm (CNA).

Vandals attacked the Buenos Aires cathedral in Argentina last Friday, spray painting the walls with various slogans against the Church, Catholic priests and the Bible. 

The vandalism took place Aug. 27 during a march organized by leftist organizations against the so-called “easy trigger,” or against “trigger happy” law enforcement officials.

The graffiti on the cathedral walls included epithets such as, “The only church that illuminates is the one that burns,” “burn the churches,” “rapist priests,” “when you read little you shoot a lot” and “I don’t read the Bible, I use it to roll joints.”

The vandals also tagged the National Museum of the Cabildo and neighboring streets with slogans such as “the easy trigger is genocide,” “the State aims, the police shoot” and “good cop = dead cop.” Some of the tags bore the anarchist symbol.

The “7th Annual March against the Easy Trigger,” held in the city’s Plaza de Mayo, was called by groups including the Workers’ Socialist Movement and the Workers Pole to protest police shootings. According to Infobae news, relatives and friends of police shooting victims also called the march. 

However, according to La Prensa, the march organizers said they had nothing to do with the graffiti on the cathedral, and did not know who the perpetrators were.

The Network for the Respect of Religion, an organization started in June whose mission is to ensure respect for Catholicism in Argentina, repudiated the attack. It complained that “there was no prevention, action or reaction from the national or municipal authorities, nor was there a subsequent statement condemning the outrage.” 

“This irrational hatred is increasing due to lazy public officials. The disinterest and silence is alarming,” the network said in a statement.

“It’s not enough to repair – at the expense of the ever higher taxes on taxpayers – the material damage. The wrong done is also spiritual for the believing community and for many citizens,” they noted.

The network also stressed that it is going to file a judicial complaint, “in order to confront the growing religious intolerance and to move the State and its officials and the Public Prosecutor’s Office (whose duty it is) to become aware of the seriousness of the situation.” 

“This is not an isolated case,” the statement read. “We want those responsible to be investigated, identified and punished. There shouldn’t be no one taken in for questioning or detained.”

The network also urged the national government and the Buenos Aires municipal government to take effective measures “to dissuade these actions in the future, which seems to be the order of the day in the demonstrations and demands of certain militant sectors.”

“Argentine society, already exhausted by the pandemic and the prevailing economic and social concerns, demands the protection of values and principles and the strictest rejection of all forms of material and symbolic violence,” the statement concluded.