3,000 Christian sites across Europe attacked, desecrated, or vandalized in 2019
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – A new report from the Gatestone Institute found that 3,000 Christian sites, with the largest concentration in France and Germany, were desecrated in Europe in 2019, which was on pace to become a record-breaking year for the incidents.
In France, churches were “vandalized, desecrated and burned at an average rate of three per day,” according to the report–the most famous of all the suspect fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in April–while in Britain “nearly half of all churches on the National Historical List for England have been ransacked.”
“Many of the crimes are being attributed to highly organized gangs which use drones, online maps, and global positioning systems first to identify their targets through aerial footage and then plot their own escape routes,” the report reads, though in France and Germany the rise of a Muslim population was in proportion to the increase in anti-Christian hostility.
The lion’s share of attacks involved “arson, defecation, desecration, looting, mockery, profanation, Satanism, theft, urination, and vandalism,” with “political graffiti, much of it anarchist or feminist in nature.”
One curious focus of the attacks, according to Gatestone senior fellow Soeren Koern, were Roman Catholic communion wafers, which he said reflected the possibility that “some of these attacks may be the work of Satanists, who use the consecrated host in a ritual called the Black Mass.”