Modern Day
Following the mugging of an 81-year-old parishioner in August 2007, cathedral staff told the media they were "under siege" by panhandlers who frequent the building. The panhandlers were involved in at least one incident daily and the Vancouver Police Department had to be called in weekly.
On March 23, 2008, First Nations protesters disrupted an Easter Sunday Mass at the cathedral by demonstrating on the steps outside. They ordered the Church to "get off native land" and demanded that they disclose the burial locations of children who died in residential schools. A similar protest occurred on October 30, 2011, when a splinter group from the Occupy Vancouver movement marched to the cathedral from the Vancouver Art Gallery. They attempted to enter the cathedral and occupy it but were thwarted by Vancouver police officers and Knights of Columbus.
Read more about this topic: Holy Rosary Cathedral (Vancouver)
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or day:
“Bureacracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)