Last year saw more than 2,200 anti-Christian hate crimes carried out across Europe, according to the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe).
According to OIDAC, the figure includes a spike in “personal attacks” which increased to 274 incidents, up from 232 in 2023, and a surge in arson attacks targeting churches and other Christian sites.
France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Austria saw the highest recorded numbers of anti-Christian hate crimes, according to OIDAC’s findings, with the NGO’s Executive Director Anja Tang warning that behind the numbers “are very concrete acts of church vandalism, arson, and physical assaults that deeply affect local communities”.
Incidents highlighted by OIDAC include the murder of a 76-year-old monk, and the injuring of others, during an attack on a Spanish monastery in November 2024; an ISIS-related attack during Sunday Mass at a Catholic Church in Istanbul that left one man dead in January 2024; and the near-total destruction in September 2024 of a historic church in Saint-Omer, France, as a result of an arson attack.
OIDAC independently documented 516 anti-Christian hate crimes last year – a figure that rises to 1,503 when theft and break-in incidents at religious sites are included.
Just under 100 arson attacks were recorded by OIDAC, a figure almost double 2023’s total.
One-third (33) of these occurred in Germany, where the Bishops’ Conference recently warned that “all taboos have been broken” regarding church vandalism.
Even in countries that have historically been predominantly Catholic, OIDAC noted data that suggests a phenomenon of underreporting anti-Christian hate crimes.
Ms Tang highlighted a recent survey from Poland, which found that almost half of the priests surveyed had experienced aggression in the past year. However, over 80 percent of those priests said that they didn’t report the incidents to the police.
“If half of Catholic clergy experience aggression in a Catholic-majority country, hostility towards Christians can no longer be treated as a marginal issue,” Ms Tang said.
Aside from hate crimes, OIDAC also identified multiple cases of legal or social restrictions affecting Christians across Europe in 2024, and into 2025. Examples cited by the Observatory included prosecutions for silent prayer under abortion “buffer zone” laws in the UK; the ongoing prosecution of Finnish MP, Päivi Räsänen, for quoting the Bible to critique her Church’s stance on Pride events; and the legal difficulties faced by British teacher, Kristie Higgs for expressing concerns about sex education content on the basis of her Christian views.
“An increasing number of Christians in Europe are facing prosecution for peacefully expressing their beliefs or traditional Christian teachings on moral issues,” Ms Tang said, adding that “while courts sometimes uphold their rights, it was often only after lengthy and costly legal battles, which are in themselves a punishment for those accused”.
OIDAC cited a number of other cases it has identified, including a Swiss court denying public funding to a Catholic girls’ school, arguing that being a Catholic school reserved for girls, the school would practise “discrimination”; a Spanish case which saw a father barred from reading the Bible to his son, granting the secular mother exclusive authority over the son’s religious education; and a French court ruling against a teacher who used a text by St Bernadette in a heritage class on the basis that it constituted a breach of neutrality laws.
In light of the “persistently high” levels of anti-Christian hate crimes and other obstacles Europe is currently seeing, OIDAC called for the appointment of an EU Coordinator on combating anti-Christian hatred, following on from the establishment of such offices to combat antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred.
OIDAC also called for the systematic collection of data on hate crimes against Christians, which it said remains “insufficient or absent in many European countries”.
The Vienna-based NGO said that it arrived at the total of 2,211 anti-Christian hate crimes by triangulating official police statistics, OSCE/ODIHR data, and its own independent research.
It said that the total for 2024 marked a “slight decline” from the 2,444 cases observed in 2023, a change it largely attributed to incomplete UK police data, excluding London, and a “temporary decrease” in France.
OIDAC Europe’s recently released full report on the matter can be accessed here.