Welcome back to Shamous Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And today I want to talk about two sort of related things.

Number one, the Reddit community ex-Catholic, which has about 40,000 members that I assume are ex-Catholics.

And the second is the Canadian residential schools mass graves, which is one of the more recent kind of standard talking points about how bad the Catholic Church is and why people should leave.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the group and then dive into kind of the argument about residential schools.

So first, the subreddit ex-Catholic, as I say, is for ex-Catholics. And it talks about how open they are to everybody except Catholics. They say, this is a support group for X-Catholics. It includes peoples of all race, nationality, creed, and religions, slash non-religions, except Catholics. And so, you know, you're not allowed to say anything that's anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim, but you are not only allowed to, you're basically required to say things that are anti-Catholic.

You're, in fact, not allowed to engage in what they call Catholic apologetics or prostalization.

And rule number seven is Catholics in general are not welcome.

So, fair enough, I can't share this video directly to the

Reddit, but I can nevertheless point it out here and say, yeah, the people making these

allegations are in many cases sharing things that are flatly false, even though rule number two of

their community is no conspiracy theories. And they say, while this subreddit is critical of the Catholic Church,

you may not use this subreddit to spread unsupported or hyperbolic information

that is not supported by evidence.

Okay, let's see how that's going.

One of the top posts of all time is called the church needs to pay for its crimes.

And it's shared by the username, Will You Quit It?

And he is in turn, or she is in turn sharing a political cartoon shared by Johnny Girl decolonized.

So that already tells you we're probably dealing with indigenous politics.

But then if that wasn't clear enough, the political cartoon is of a church that says,

love thy neighbor, and buried beneath it are just tons and tons of skulls. Now this is a not

particularly subtle reference to the alleged mass graves found across Canada. And sure enough, the person who posted

it then shared an NPR story that says more graves found at new site, Canadian indigenous

...