An Interview with Maj. Christopher J. Barca
Christopher J. Barca still remembers the moment he knew he would be a police officer. He was about five years old and was home alone with his older sister while their parents were at a dinner. Suddenly, there was a loud rapping on a back window. Young Chris Barca raised the shade to find a man with his face to the glass, looking inside. Barca dropped the shade back and called the police. Within minutes, an officer had arrived.
“I’ll never forget the sense of safety and security I felt when the officer was standing in our doorway, telling us he would keep watch over us that night,” Barca says. “I didn’t want him to leave.”
Later that night, Barca was lying in bed right beside the window where the man—who later turned out to be his brother’s friend playing a prank—had been peering in a couple of hours before. Unable to sleep, Barca was surprised to find his room suddenly filled with light. He looked outside to see the police officer who promised to look after him driving slowly by their house in his patrol car. He was shining his searchlight on the house, keeping watch as he’d said.
“The officer must have seen me in the window,” Barca recalls. “He flashed his blue lights and I knew that all would be well.”
Young Officer Barca
From that night until his retirement from the Palm Beach Gardens police department in 2017, Christopher Barca dedicated his life to his calling, police work. He never wavered in his resolve to join the police force, going through grade school, high school, and then college with the singular purpose to be a cop. Later, in his own patrol car, he used to drive through neighborhoods in the small hours of the night and say silently to the people in the houses, “Sleep soundly. I am looking out for you.” Protecting and serving his community is the entire reason Barca wanted to join the force.
I gave everything I could to the job and to my fellow citizens,” says Barca.
But he never had any illusions that being a police officer would win him friends. “The first day at police academy,” Barca relates, “our instructor told us that we should not expect to be thanked or liked for the job we were training to do.” The instructor’s words stuck with Barca: “If you want to be treated like a hero, go down the hall and join the fire department.” Anyone who goes through police academy and then starts working a beat learns quickly that the community doesn’t always appreciate being protected and served, Barca says. But police officers keep going out on patrol because they are dedicated to helping others.
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“I gave everything I could to the job and to my fellow citizens,” says Barca. His record of service is exemplary: in addition to his police work, he has completed training at the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Academy in Quantico and at the Department of Homeland Security, and in the United States Coast Guard Reserve he attended Port Security A School. Barca is SWAT certified. He has worked security details for visiting dignitaries, including presidents, and has been a part of anti-narcotics operations, arrests of armed-and-dangerous criminals, and takedowns of organized crime rings. Police work is dangerous, but Barca seems to have chosen the most dangerous and the least visible assignments of all.
He attributes his safety through all of this to the power of the rosary. “I carried a rosary in my breast pocket,” Barca remembers. “During the last ten years of my career, I took time during my breaks to pray the rosary every day.”
The Barca Family
Even though Barca knew full well that being a police officer would bring plenty of risk and few rewards, he says that he has been dismayed these past few years to find himself and his fellow officers, not just disliked, but vilified.
“I’ve lost sleep since retiring in 2017,” Barca tells me. After the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown—and with the encouragement of left-wing activists and politicians—Barca says that what started as racially-charged protests in America changed into anti-police broadsides. “I don’t know how people could be doing the job right now,” Barca says. He recalls the 1960s, when Black Panther members were assassinating police officers in the streets of New York City in cold blood. “A police officer always has a target on his or her back,” Barca relates. But these past few years the media and the left-wing political establishment, including academia, have fueled an ongoing attack on authority in general, especially the police.
For Barca, Black Lives Matter is part of an attempt to clear the United States of police officers, or at least so weaken police forces that violent Marxist revolutionaries will be able to succeed in taking over the country.
I got to know Barca after he contacted me recently. He had read a piece I had written for Crisis in which I’d referred to Black Lives Matter as a Marxist terrorist organization. His assessment is the same as mine. For Barca, Black Lives Matter is part of an attempt to clear the United States of police officers, or at least so weaken police forces that violent Marxist revolutionaries will be able to succeed in taking over the country. Barca understands that BLM foundress Patrisse Cullors has boasted of being a “trained Marxist,” and that she was schooled by Eric Mann, an ex-convict and domestic terrorist who worked alongside Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
Ayers and Dohrn, readers will remember, were part of the Weather Underground terrorist organization. The Weather Underground carried out a series of bombings and murders and left a trail of dead police officers and security personnel in their wake. They enjoyed using the slur “pigs” to refer to police, and their favorite target was a statue honoring police officers slain by violent terrorists at Haymarket.
In all of this, the Barcas wanted to turn to the Church—but Barca says that he feels the Church abandoned him.
Ayers was a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois. Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University. Barca lives near a college town now and says that he gets nasty looks and gestures from students almost every day when they see the “support the police” decal on his car. The hatred for the police that the media gins up in the streets is taught openly in academia, sometimes by the very people who targeted the police.
The general breakdown in public morality goes all the way to the top. Vice President Kamala Harris tells sexual-assailant Jacob Blake that she is “proud” of him. George Floyd, who held a pregnant woman at gunpoint during an armed robbery, is lionized as a great American, and sitting members of Congress issue thinly-veiled threats to jurors trying a police officer for Floyd’s murder.
But Barca sees an even more disturbing pattern to Black Lives Matter and the general leftist disdain for authority. In his police work, Barca has encountered many criminals who are involved in the occult. Television shows today openly glorify Satanism, and “After-School Satan” clubs are proliferating at American schools. Teachers at a public school in Madison, Wisconsin, harass Christian students having prayerful lunches at a park in town. Drag Queen Story Hours for toddlers have become a staple in Democrat-controlled school districts. Requests for exorcisms are skyrocketing and dark forces appear to be emboldened by the cultural acceptance of the demonic.
It was a powerful reminder that we must cling to Christ and the Cross,” Barca says.
Barca’s wife runs a popular Catholic YouTube channel, “A Catholic Wife”. (https://youtube.com/c/ACatholicWife) When Mrs. Barca posted comments critical of Black Lives Matter, she received “dozens” of death threats and messages hoping that she and her daughter would be raped.
Officer and Mrs. Barca
In all of this, the Barcas wanted to turn to the Church—but Barca says that he feels the Church abandoned him. “I saw Catholic prelates kneeling with their fists in the air,” Barca says. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement supporting BLM. Priests and bishops were openly siding with a Marxist terrorist group rooted in the occult and in the general secularist assault on faith and order. Priests are also called to protect and serve. Across the board, it seems that a life of sacrifice and self-denial is mocked in the USA.
“It was a powerful reminder that we must cling to Christ and the Cross,” Barca says. At the hour when darkness is ascendant in America, he saw Churchmen glorifying works of evil, and living in lies. Even EWTN host Gloria Purvis took up the call to “defund the police” and voiced her support of BLM (which, not coincidentally, is deeply enmeshed in the homosexual agenda). When EWTN finally fired Purvis, celebrities and noted “Catholics” denounced EWTN and vowed never to donate to the network again. The breakdown of Catholicism in America has been, for Barca, even harder to witness than the attacks on his beloved calling, the service and protection of others as a police officer.
Finally, I ask Barca what he thinks about the future of America. He says he has been grateful to Michael Matt and The Remnant for keeping the Faith and speaking up for those who serve, including the police. That kind of hope is sorely needed now, Barca remarks.
“The left has taken over everything,” Barca says. “Barring a miracle, I don’t know how we will get our country back.”
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Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan