God bless your Church, give it perseverance in adversity and peace in persecution, grant it your strength to prevail against the forces of evil and to endure the disdain of the world and those enslaved to the flesh. Grant this through Jesus Christ, your Son and our Lord. Amen.

This is an act of sacrilege, a sign of the disdain with which we are held by secular society. Would they do such a thing to the tombs of Protestant bishops, much less to those of Jewish or Muslim leaders, regardless of the crimes of which those religious communities had been accused? I think not. They only do these horrible things to the Catholic Church because they hate us for our "meddling." We've been held to be respectable for too long, perhaps distrusted for our beliefs which challenge the desires of the flesh but still invited into society and allowed to hold our Masses with a degree of freedom. It would seem that the world has grown tired of our chiding as it falls deeper into the abyss of carnality and avarice, and so it has decided to bring us low by destroying our sacred tombs and desecrating our holy objects. Unfortunately for them we've been through this many times before, and our Scriptures along with the grace of God will bring us through just as they have always done throughout the last two thousand years.

We've had it easy for a long time, being held respectable by the world may have its advantages but it doesn't help one to lead a holy life. We've grown comfortable in polite society, holding a grudging acceptance from those whose great-grandfathers scoffed at us and regarded us as vermin and trash. Now it would seem that this acceptance, this toleration, is at an end, and frankly it may be the best thing that could happen to the Church. We are supposed to be at odds with the world, despised by it because we say the things that it doesn't want to hear. We are supposed to speak truth to power, and that simply can't happen if we ourselves constitute that power. A rising tide of persecution may strip away from our ranks those among us who are perfectly willing to worship God in comfort but unwilling to do so in adversity, but those who remain will worship Him all the more in their absence. We may not continue to have 1.1 billion adherents, but the ones who remain will be all the more devoted due to the risk involved. This is a very clear violation of the Church's freedom of worship, showing clear contempt for the faith of Catholics, and it would be naive to think that such things couldn't happen in other countries.

This attack on the Church makes me sick, as it should to all Catholics. Anybody who would use these thinnest of excuses to desecrate sacred crypts can't have much respect for our religion. It's the beginning of a new era for the Church, an era of persecution and contempt, and this is but the first of likely many attacks to come. God bless us all.