Unidentified vandals desecrated a Christian church in Goleszów, southern Poland, last weekend, painting Satanic symbols on the main doors of the building.
Using white spray paint, the perpetrators wrote the words “Ora pro nobis, Lucifer,” Latin for “Pray for us, Lucifer,” around an inverted Christian cross, along with the Latin words for the Church of the devil.
The criminals also painted a pentagram and the number 666, which refers to the number of the “beast” in the biblical book of Revelation, interpreted by some to be the anti-Christ.
The incident took place on Saturday night and the profanation was discovered Sunday morning when the sacristan arrived to prepare for Sunday Mass.
Christian sites across Europe suffered a record number of attacks in the year 2019, with some 3,000 churches, schools, cemeteries, and monuments vandalized, looted, desecrated, or defaced.
In its 2019 report, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE) chronicled the increase in Christian persecution throughout Europe, pointing to “a rise in the number of churches, Christian symbols, and cemeteries across Europe being vandalized, desecrated, and burned, compared to previous years.”
Moreover, the report states, across Europe, “Christians have been fired, sued, and even arrested for exercising their freedom of expression or conscience.”
“As we have noted in the past, Christians in Europe are not simply experiencing social discrimination, prejudice, or restrictions on freedom. Christians, including clergy, have been attacked or killed for their faith,” the report stated.
The report also cited the official annual crime statistics for 2018 provided by the French Interior Ministry, which included 1063 “anti-Christian acts” and showed that in the ten-year period from 2008 to 2018, there was an increase of some 250 percent in attacks on Christian sites.
Another report compiling the anti-Christian acts perpetrated during 2019 revealed a range of profanation including arson, defecation, desecration, looting, mockery, Satanism, theft, urination, and vandalism.
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