By LifeSiteNews (Faith) | Created at 2024-11-21 21:47:27 | Updated at 2024-11-22 02:30:25
4 hours ago
Thu Nov 21, 2024 - 4:42 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) — Anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe have more than tripled from 2022 to 2023, according to a new report, and an estimated large number of cases remain unrecorded.
In a 2024 report released November 15, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) found — with gaps in reporting for many countries — a total of 2,444 anti-Christian hate crimes committed in 2023 in contrast to 749 incidents recorded in 2022.
The hate crimes consisted largely of vandalism, including acts of desecration against sacred images at churches. The documented incidents also included 232 personal attacks on Christians involving physical violence and harassment.
Police statistics on the crimes were only available from Austria, Finland, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, leaving it to OIDAC Europe to obtain statistics from the remaining 30 countries included in the report. OIDAC numbers capture only a fraction of the incidents that can be documented by police reports, meaning a “high number of unreported cases” is assumed, according to Anja Hoffmann, executive director of OIDAC Europe.
The numbers from 2023 mark an explosion in anti-Christian hate crimes amid a “steady increase” in the number of such incidents in the almost 15-year period OIDAC Europe has been documenting them.
In cases in which information on the perpetrators was available, it was found that the majority involved radical Islamists, followed significantly by those with anti-religious or radical left backgrounds.
Violent anti-Christian hate crimes by radical Muslims plagued a large swath of Europe in 2023. The OIDAC report cited a few examples, such as a January 2023 incident in Algeciras, Spain, when a jihadist killed an altar server and injured four people with a machete as he shouted “Allah is great” and “Death to Christians.”
In the UK, a convert to Christianity from Islam was stabbed six times by his Muslim roommate, who had begun to threaten him after he converted.
In Italy, a Tunisian Christian convert was beaten and robbed by a mob of Islamic fellow Tunisians for “attending a Christian church.”
The European country with the highest number of recorded anti-Christian hate crimes — about 1,000 — was France. About 90 percent of the incidents targeted churches or cemeteries, according to the French ministry of the Interior, in a trend that has seen historic French churches damaged and devastated through arson.
In January 2023 alone, four churches in Paris were targeted by arson attacks involving Molotov cocktails, and a total of 14 arson attacks were committed in France from January to October 2024, according to the French Religious Heritage Observatory.
The UK and Germany follow France in their number of 2023 incidents of anti-Christian hate crimes. Remarkably, the number of such crimes more than doubled in Germany last year, and the police recorded a whopping 2,000-plus incidents of damage to Christian places of worship.
Notably, anti-Christian hate crimes more than doubled in Germany over the last year, from 135 in 2022 to 277 in 2023. In terms of church vandalism, German police recorded more than 2,000 cases of property damage to Christian places of worship in 2023. Europe-wide, nearly a quarter of all crimes of vandalism against churches in 2023 involved intentional acts of desecration.
The European trend coincides with a rise in attacks on Christian churches in Canada and the U.S., where attacks on churches, especially Catholic churches, spiked after the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision.
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