“The French government reported 275 anti-Christian acts in 2008,” OIDACE Executive Director Ellen Fantini told The Christian Post on Monday. “So that is anything from targeting a church in some way with vandalism or a public Christian statue, it could be a Christian cemetery or it could be actual assaults against French Christians with an anti-Christian bias.”

“If we look at 2018 and 2019, the numbers are little over 1,000 per year. So the increase from 275 to a little over 1,000 works out to 285% increase.” 

According to France’s Interior Ministry, there were 1,052 recorded anti-Christian incidents committed in 2019, which mostly consist of attacks on religious property. The 2019 incidents are broken down into 996 “acts” and 56 “threats.”

The observatory’s executive director opines that part of the reason there is an increase in attacks and acts of vandalism committed at places of worship in France is that the rising secularism in the country “has led the society generally not to think of churches as special sacred places.”

Fantini said perpetrators of church attacks and acts of vandalism in France tend to be radical Islamists or people aligned on the radical extremes of the political left, including Antifa movements, anarchists and radical feminists. 

While there is not enough data available to calculate the rise of anti-Christian incidents throughout Europe, Fantini believes that such incidents are “absolutely on the rise everywhere.”

“We see in Germany arsons and vandalism, we see it in Spain, we see it in the U.K. Really, I can’t say that there is any place in Europe where this phenomenon is decreasing,” she warned.