Police in Paris are searching for an “African type” man accused of vandalising and desecrating a Roman Catholic church in central Paris, who they say has a prior history of church attacks.
Incidents of vandalism and arson of Christian churches have spiked in recent weeks in Germany and France, a Vienna-based watchdog group reports.
A church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was left in shock after the theft of its tabernacle, an irreplaceable piece of sacred art.
The Observatory on Discrimination and Intolerance Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE) denounced Wednesday a recent spate of anti-Christian vandalism in Austria and mainstream media’s failure to report on it.
A Canadian radio personality called for the burning of churches, as news outlets have reported more Catholic and Anglican churches being burned in parts of the country, primarily on First Nations reserves.
“St. Joseph’s Church … was vandalized this week, as an unknown individual or individuals painted ‘satanic’ and ‘anarchist’ symbols on its doors,” reports the New Haven Register.
Unidentified arsonists placed a large trash bin against a side door of the Saint-Pierre cathedral in Rennes late last week and set the contents on fire, in an apparent attempt to torch the church.
Unidentified vandals broke into the Church of Saint-Jean-des-Cordeliers in southwest France Tuesday and jimmied open the tabernacle to steal the consecrated hosts.
The village church of Saint-Remy in northern France was found vandalized on Friday despite a coronavirus lockdown confining people to their homes.
Thieves used a car as a battering ram to break down the doors of the Oloron-Sainte-Marie cathedral in the French Pyrenees and stole multiple religious objects, while in Oberhaslach a statue of Saint Bernadette was a beheaded.
French police in the city of Nîmes say they have arrested a man in connection to a particularly vulgar church attack that occurred in February in which the suspect smeared faeces on the wall of the church.
The over 800-year-old Basilica of Saint-Denis was heavily vandalised this week with vandals smashing stained glass windows and severely damaging the nearly 200-year-old organ.
A security specialist has said that stealing lead from church roofs should be treated as an anti-Christian hate crime because thieves know it will disrupt religious services.
A 37-year-old male identified only by his first name, Ahmed, was brought to a court in Chalon-sur-Saône accused of threatening to blow up a cathedral with a hand grenade.
The desecration of 215 gravesites in Castres in 2015 sparked condemnation and outrage when it was discovered that it was perpetrated by a Muslim man. But it took French courts three years to declare it an anti-Christian hate crime.
