ROME — Religiously motivated hate crimes against Christians in Europe jumped by a whopping 226 percent in just one year, according to a grim report by a prominent Christian persecution watchdog group.
On Friday, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) released its Annual Report 2024, which documents a startling rise in violent incidents and hostility against Christians, as well as in vandalism and arson attacks on churches.
In its new report, the Vienna-based Observatory identifies 2,444 anti-Christian hate crimes documented by police and civil society in 35 European countries in 2023, up from 749 such acts identified in 2022.
The hate crimes included 232 personal attacks on Christians, entailing harassment, threats and physical violence, reveals the report, published on November 15 to coincide with the International Day of Tolerance.
In January 2023, a jihadist attacked two Catholic churches in Algeciras, Spain. The man killed an altar server with a machete and injured four people, while shouting “Allah is great” and “Death to Christians.”
In November, a Tunisian Christian convert was beaten and robbed in Italy for “attending a Christian church.” The assailants were fellow Tunisians who opposed his conversion from Islam to the Christian faith, according to the presiding judge in the case.
“As far as anti-Christian hate crimes are concerned, we have registered 2,444 cases for 2023, but assume a high number of unreported cases,” Anja Hoffmann, Executive Director of OIDAC Europe, stated.
In fact, police statistics on anti-Christian hate crimes were only publicly available from five European countries, namely Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, yet these five countries alone recorded a total of 2,111 anti-Christian hate crimes
Leading the pack with the highest number of anti-Christian hate crimes in 2023 is France with nearly 1,000 such incidents, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.
In January 2023, arson attacks, including Molotov cocktails, were carried out against four churches in Paris. Such crimes show no signs of abating and according to the French Religious Heritage Observatory, 14 criminal arson attacks have taken place in France in the first ten months of 2024.
In March of 2023, two Catholic nuns in Nantes, France, reported that they had been subjected to “beatings, spitting and insults,” forcing them to move away because of the constant hostility and insecurity.
In the UK, one Christian was seriously injured and another killed in a knife attack in October 2023. The first victim, a convert to Christianity from Islam, was stabbed repeatedly by his Muslim flatmate while lying in bed. The perpetrator considered him an “apostate” and therefore “somebody who deserved to die.”
Notably, anti-Christian hate crimes more than doubled in Germany over the last year, from 135 in 2022 to a total of 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.
Of the cases documented by OIDAC Europe where the motives or background of the perpetrators could be established, the majority of perpetrators had a radical Islamist background, followed by anti-religious, radical left, and other political motives, the report found.
The report also documents legal developments in several European countries that violate the religious freedom of Christians, including “hate speech” legislation that has been used to prosecute Christians for voicing mainstream Christian beliefs in public.