Catholics and other Christians across the world are facing a troubling rise in aggressive acts against churches, with recent incidents in both New York and Lourdes, France underscoring what many describe as an alarming global pattern of anti-Christian hostility.
According to LifeSiteNews, police in Queens, New York are investigating a series of coordinated attacks on three churches after an unidentified vandal carrying a rainbow LGBT “Pride” flag defaced their buildings with “anti-Christian” graffiti. The suspect, masked with a rainbow cloth, first targeted Refuge Church of Christ at 1:40 a.m., spray-painting the words “anti-gay cult,” according to reporting from the New York Post cited by LifeSiteNews.
The same message was then graffitied on City of Oasis Church of Deliverance just 100 feet away. Roughly twenty minutes later, the vandal struck St. Mary’s Star of the Sea, where the Catholic parish suffered more severe damage. Police told LifeSiteNews the perpetrator painted “Welcome Cult Members” and “cult” on the walls and sidewalks, also defacing the faces of two religious statues.
The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force is treating the incident as “multiple acts of criminal mischief as a hate crime,” according to LifeSiteNews.
This comes amid a sharply documented rise in attacks on Christian sites nationwide. LifeSiteNews, citing an August report from the Family Research Council, noted 1,384 acts of hostility against Christian churches between January 2018 and December 2024. Numbers surged after the leak of the Dobbs decision in 2022, jumping to 198 incidents that year and doubling again in 2023 to 485, before registering 415 in 2024. According to the data, vandalism accounted for 284 of the 2024 incidents, alongside arson, gun-related crimes, and bomb threats.
This trend is not limited to the United States.
In Lourdes, France, authorities have opened an investigation after the Sacré-Cœur parish church was vandalized with messages “insulting to the Catholic religion,” according to Le Figaro and reported by LifeSiteNews. Police discovered the damage during a morning patrol on November 11, finding the main entrance covered in white-marker graffiti.
Images released the following day confirmed two messages written directly on the wooden doors: “À mort Jésus-Christ” (“Death to Jesus Christ”) and “Sale race de Jésus-Christ” (“Dirty race of Jesus Christ”), LifeSiteNews reported.
The attack occurred during the popular release of the devotional film Sacré Cœur, which has become a nationwide box-office success. “The fact that a building dedicated to the Sacred Heart was attacked while the film ‘Sacré Cœur’ was a box office hit in France and being exported seems particularly telling,” a reporter for Reinformation.TV commented, according to LifeSiteNews.
France has experienced a dramatic rise in anti-Christian crimes overall. Data presented to the European Parliament by the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe recorded 2,444 anti-Christian hate crimes in 2023, nearly 1,000 of which occurred in France—representing 41 percent of all such cases on the continent, according to LifeSiteNews. The Observatory reported that 62 percent of these incidents involved vandalism, 10 percent arson, and 7 percent physical assaults. French authorities documented 322 anti-Christian acts in the first five months of 2025 alone, marking a 13 percent increase from the same period the year prior.
Growing alarm has spurred civil leaders to speak out. In September, LifeSiteNews noted that 86 French senators signed a joint statement urging enhanced protection for Christian sites. Senator Sylviane Noël wrote that “Christians must be protected in France, as all other believers are.”
Across continents, the pattern is unmistakable: Catholic and Christian communities face mounting hostility while places of worship—both humble parish churches and internationally renowned shrines—are increasingly targeted.
For the faithful, these incidents are a sobering call to prayer, vigilance, and renewed commitment to witnessing Christ’s love in a world where hostility is rising, but the Gospel remains unchanged.
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