Less than a week after 49 Egyptian Christians were massacred in two bombings in Alexandria and Tanta during Palm Sunday Mass, Venezuela's socialist thugs stormed a Wednesday Holy Week mass, assaulting the presiding archbishop of Caracas and the church's worshipers and trashing and looting the church.  The attack wasn't on the same level as the terrorist bombing, but it signaled an emboldened and increasingly violent state, which may well have been drawing inspiration from the horror in Egypt.

As one wag on Lucianne.com put it, "Communism: the other religion of peace."

The archbishop in question, Cardinal Jorge Urosa Sabino, was no ordinary archbishop.  For years he has blasted the horrors of Venezuela's chavismo for leaving the poor more impoverished and hungry than ever, even as it purports to speak in the poor's name.  He's denounced dictatorship and warned of its ascent in the country.  Along with many archbishops, he's tried to warn Pope Francis that materialistic communism is an unmitigated disaster for the country.

Incredibly, the Vatican response to this desecration of the Mass during the holiest week of the Christian calendar has been...silence.  There's nothing about it on Vatican Radio – just radio silence.  It's almost a curious echo of the Vatican's lack of outrage over the assault and murder of a French priest as he said mass in Normandy, France.

Christianity may demand turning the other cheek, but the Mass is sacred and there is a Christian duty to resist evil.  If the Vatican won't stand up for its people, at a minimum it must stand up for the sacredness of the Mass.  Yet somehow it doesn't.  And Pope Francis has been notoriously soft on the Caracas regime, doing little to mitigate the situation, as he seems to view both sides with equal moral weight.  But it ought to say something when its own archbishop has been attacked at Mass and his church has been looted by criminals at the behest of the state.  It ought to defend the sacredness of the Mass.

By contrast, when Pussy Riot's punk rockers tried to desecrate an Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy in Moscow in 2012, President Putin wasted no time shipping them for a two-year stretch in Gulag Archipelago in the frozen wilds of Siberia.  Many thought that was draconian, but whatever you think of the punishment, there haven't been any interrupted Divine Liturgies since.

The Vatican continues to say nothing.