68-year-old man charged with arson attack against Canadian church: 'Blatant anti-Christian bigotry'

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, August 27, 2026

A 68-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly setting the fire that destroyed a historic Roman Catholic church in Canada earlier this week, marking the latest in a long list of destructive acts against churches in the country over the past five years.

Gilles Mallet appeared in provincial court Monday after being charged with arson in connection with the destruction of Saint-Simon Church on the Acadian Peninsula, a Catholic church in Saint-Simon, New Brunswick, according to a Tuesday press release from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Firefighters serving the small settlement of approximately 600 people received a call at around 3:30 a.m. on Monday morning that a blaze had engulfed the historic church building, which was more than a century old and the largest wooden church in New Brunswick, a northeastern province in the Maritimes on the Atlantic coast.

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Horrific scenes as the steeple collapses at Saint Simon church as it burns to the ground

A 68 year old man has been arrested for the anti Catholic terror attack pic.twitter.com/NbAKLUE19d

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) August 26, 2026

The flames had spread through the sacristy by the time firefighters arrived, and they were unable to save the structure, according to the CBC. "We tried to contain it but as soon as it gets inside the roofing, forget it, you can't extinguish it," Chief Luc Dugas of the Caraquet Fire Department told Radio-Canada.

The building was unoccupied when it burned, though Dugas noted that motion sensors detected movement in the church at around 3:20 a.m.

The New Brunswick Office of the Fire Marshal determined that the fire had been intentionally set. The RCMP, which is the national police force in Canada, immediately began investigating the fire as suspicious.

The RCMP said in its statement that they had identified Mallet as a person of interest early in their investigation, though they did not provide a motive. His bail hearing is set for Aug. 28.

The destruction of the church has reportedly devastated the small community, which is part of the nearby Municipality of Caraquet and whose population has been dwindling, according to Caraquet Mayor Bernard Theriault.

"It was a very beautiful church by [the Acadian architect] Nazaire Dugas, built between 1910 and 1920 and we still used it," the mayor told Radio-Canada's La Matinale. "Le Festival Acadien used it again last week for recitals and concerts."

"The church was the last element that belongs to the community, that was built for and by the community," the mayor said.

Monique Albert Léger, a local woman who was married at the church and watched it succumb to the flames, told the CBC that its destruction "hits close to home."

"It's our heart, it's our lungs, it's the center of our village. We just lost a big piece," she said.

Mallet's arrest prompted reaction from Jamil Jivani, a member of the Canadian Parliament who described the alleged attack as an "act of blatant anti-Christian bigotry" amid an increasingly anti-Christian Canadian government.

"Churches continue to be burned to the ground in Canada, while the Carney government has spent the last year focused on criminalizing passages of the Bible and censoring military chaplains," Jivani said.

The destruction of Saint-Simon Church is the latest among approximately 120 Canadian churches that have been burned, vandalized or otherwise desecrated since May 2021, according to data from The Democracy Fund. Of these, at least 44 churches have been destroyed.

A 46-page report titled "Scorched Earth," which was released last year by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, found that arson attacks against Canadian churches had more than doubled since 2021. The study, which was the first empirical examination of such church attacks, attributed the surge largely to public backlash over alleged unmarked graves at former Catholic residential schools, rather than anti-religious hostility.

Drawing on national fire statistics, police records and media reports, the authors count a sharp break from pre-2021 levels and note that the frequency "has not significantly declined since then." Fewer than 4% of the church arsons between 2021 and 2023 led to criminal charges, leaving the perpetrators and their motives unknown in more than 96% of cases, according to the study.

John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist and author of Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, suggested rampant church destruction is a physical manifestation of spiritual collapse.

"I know it seems a bit on-the-nose, but one of the features of a post-Christian West, in addition to things like child sacrifice (abortion & euthanasia) and sexual degeneracy (transgenderism, gay 'marriage') is the burning of churches, especially Catholic Churches, as we see now in Canada where it has become common," Davidson said in a Monday X post.