ROME — Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has denounced heightened religious intolerance in France, demonstrated by a recent report on attacks on churches.

Unfortunately, vandalism and profanation of churches is a “very present phenomenon in France,” Cardinal Parolin declares in an interview published Monday, “and even the causes of the Notre-Dame fire are still not clear.”

“The number of attacks indicates that religious intolerance is growing despite all the efforts to try to respect each other,” the cardinal states, in reference to a report on anti-religious acts released last month by the French Ministry of the Interior.

“On the other hand, we cannot overlook the issue of radicalization, due to so many different factors,” he added.

The report speaks of 1,659 anti-religious acts in 2021, of which 857 were anti-Christian, but also insists that the true figures are “most certainly” much higher.

Anti-Catholic acts have been marked by “an increase in attacks on people in the public sphere,” the report said, reflecting “a general state of tension in society.”

According to Ellen Fantini, the former director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE), anti-Christian incidents in France rose by a remarkable 285 percent between 2008 and 2019.

A 2020 report by the Gatestone Institute compiling anti-Christian acts perpetrated during 2019 revealed a range of profanation of Christian sites including arson, defecation, desecration, looting, mockery, Satanism, theft, urination, and vandalism. The greatest number of acts of violence against Christian sites occurred in France, where churches, schools, cemeteries, and monuments are routinely vandalized, desecrated, and burned.

While some of the attacks are secular in nature, many others “reflect a deep-seated hostility toward Christianity,” the Gatestone report stated. “Such attacks include smearing feces on representations of Jesus Christ or statues of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Other attacks involve the defilement or theft of Communion wafers, which Roman Catholics believe are transformed into the real presence of Christ when consecrated.”

“Some of these attacks may be the work of Satanists, who use the consecrated host in a ritual called the Black Mass,” the report added.