A Vienna-based observatory has highlighted a sharp uptick concerning the anti-religious violence in France in the past 12 years. More recent incidents included last week’s fire inside the historic Nantes Cathedral.
At the present time, The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDACE) serves as the sole observatory in the continent that addresses the discrimination that European Christians face.
On Monday, OIDACE Executive Director Ellen Fantini highlighted the matters of the ongoing incidents in an interview with The Christian Post.
“The French government reported 275, what they call, anti-Christian acts [in 2008],” Fantini noted. “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,” she added.
A report by France’s Interior Ministry found that there was about 1,052 recorded anti-Christian incidents committed in 2019. They incidents were mainly acts of vandalism. Last year’s acts were separated into two categories, “acts” with 996 incidences and “threats” with 56 incidences.
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