Violent attacks or threats against Christians and arson attacks against churches in Europe spiked sharply in 2024, according to a new report released Monday by the watchdog group Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe).
The report, which the Vienna-based watchdog group officially launched Tuesday, noted the 2,211 hate crimes targeting Christians recorded across the continent in 2024 marked a drop from the number of incidents in 2023, but that the nature of the crimes had grown more violent.
Physical attacks against Christian individuals rose from 232 cases in 2023 to 274 cases in 2024, while arson attacks on churches and Christian properties reached 94, which was nearly twice the previous year's figure. The report noted that data regarding personal attacks was not available from France and the U.K. for 2024.
The report also noted that the highest numbers of anti-Christian incidents overall were in France, the U.K., Germany, Spain and Austria.
Among the violent incidents, OIDAC Europe highlighted the murder of a 76-year-old Catholic friar who was killed in November 2024 by a man who stormed the Friary of Santo Espiritu del Monte in Spain while screaming, "I am Jesus Christ!"
The man, a 26-year-old from Morocco, also injured seven others as he went room to room in the monastery, assaulting monks while claiming he was acting "in the name of God," according to The Mirror.
Another notable incident included gunmen affiliated with ISIS attacking the Church of Santa Maria in Istanbul, Turkey, during Sunday Mass in January 2024. The shooters reportedly shot and killed a 52-year-old man who was about to convert to Christianity and be baptized, according to the BBC.
Also highlighted was the near-total destruction by arson of Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer, France, in September 2024. The neo-Gothic church was completed in 1859 and restored in 2018, and the fire came weeks after another blaze engulfed Rouen's historic cathedral on July 11 in a scene reminiscent of the fire that caused catastrophic damage to the iconic Notre-Dame de Paris in 2019.
The destruction of the church drew the attention of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been outspoken about what he views as the crisis Europe faces from years of unrestrained immigration.
OIDAC Europe said it independently verified 516 hate crimes against Christians; when vandalism, theft and burglaries at Christian sites are added, the organization’s documented total climbs to 1,503 incidents.
Germany accounted for one-third of the recorded arson attacks, which have prompted the country's Catholic Bishops' Conference to declare in October that "all taboos have been broken" in the wave of church desecrations, which included defiling confessionals and beheading statues of Jesus Christ.
In cases where motive could be determined, the report cited radical Islam as the most common ideology driving the attacks, followed by radical left-wing ideology and other political motives. They noted 15 incidents specifically featured satanic symbols or references.
OIDAC Europe placed its findings in the wider context of 2024 hate crime data from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which logged more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents, roughly 1,000 anti-Christian cases, and around 950 anti-Muslim incidents reported by European governments and NGOs.
The watchdog also observed the increasing examples of legal discrimination against Christians in Europe, such as the potentially landmark case of Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish member of Parliament who has been repeatedly dragged into court over a 6-year-old Bible verse tweet that criticized the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for promoting LGBT pride month.
The organization also mentioned individuals who have been arrested and prosecuted under "buffer zone" laws for silent prayer near abortion facilities in the U.K.
It also noted the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a British Army veteran of the war in Afghanistan who was found guilty last year of breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order when he prayed silently near an abortion clinic for the soul of his son, who had been aborted years before.
Other legal cases OIDAC Europe highlighted included a Swiss court withholding public funding from a Catholic all-girls school, ruling its single-sex and religious character constituted unlawful discrimination.
They also noted two cases out of Spain, including one that ruled against a male-only religious brotherhood for not admitting a woman, and another that prohibited a father from reading the Bible to his son after granting his non-religious mother exclusive decision-making power over his upbringing.
OIDAC Europe recommended the European Union be more proactive in addressing the rising antipathy toward Christianity in Europe, such as by appointing a coordinator to combat anti-Christian hatred, similar to coordinators that exist to combat antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred.
