By Robert Royal
When Notre Dame de Paris nearly burned down in 2019, due to a fire started (accidentally?) by workers, the world was stunned by the near loss of one of the iconic monuments of the West, and moreover a religious landmark. But churches are burned or subjected to other types of attacks around the world these days, year after year, not by accident, but by deliberate anti-Christian acts. Have you never heard of it? That’s the problem.
No one is surprised that Christian churches suffer frequent attacks in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They have been occurring for years, with a strong increase since September 11 and the rise of radical Islamic groups, as I have documented in my book The Martyrs of the New Millennium. And these attacks often add insult to injury by being scheduled to take place on major Christian holidays, such as Christmas and Easter.
What surprises, however, is the little attention that Western media pay to the ongoing violence. In Nigeria, the widespread slaughter of Christians—thousands in 2025—and assaults on churches and Christian schools, along with kidnappings and ransom demands, could no longer be ignored by news agencies and governments. But the difficult situation of Christians in a dozen other countries never attracts serious attention. That failure clearly has a double cause: the reluctance of journalists—newsrooms are overwhelmingly progressive—to contribute to «Islamophobia» and a mild anti-Christian prejudice.
The American political scientist Samuel Huntington stated that Islam has «bloody borders,» evident not only in recent times, but in the long interactions between Islam and Christians, Hindus, etc. Modern analysts often try to deny that these conflicts are religious; in a materialistic era, it is believed that political and economic causes are the real ones, and religious motives, at best, secondary. But the only way to believe that is by ignoring centuries of history and the Quran itself.
Even so, it is surprising that those same media also manage to quickly overlook or, more typically, ignore blatant anti-Christian acts even in the West.
We don’t need to look far to find shocking examples. Earlier this month, in «celebration» of International Women’s Day, churches in Mexico—the Catholic Mexico!—were attacked with literal fire by feminist extremists. But it’s not just there. Throughout Latin America, including Argentina during the reign of the Argentine Pope Francis, similar things have happened due to feminist rage and various types of radical ideologies. In Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, we have even seen the ongoing saga of Marxist repression against the Church, remnants of the totalitarian nightmares of the last century. And those regimes have the support of old-style state communism in China, which notoriously persecutes religion.
A Mexican feminist proclaimed: «I fear those who pray the Rosary more than the criminals.» It is encouraging to see, as in Mexico, Catholic men forming human shields around church buildings. But where was the coverage—outside of Catholic news organizations—of something that is a publicly evident fact of our time? It is not a mere Catholic allegation to point out that if the target had been a synagogue or a mosque, our sharp press guardians would be investigating and relentlessly reminding us of the systemic prejudice.
It is sad to say, but the Church itself has sometimes been too willing to blame Catholics for past misdeeds, sometimes even when they didn’t even occur.
In 2021, reports emerged in Canada that ground-penetrating radars had discovered over 1000 graves—sometimes called «mass graves»—near «residential schools,» government institutions often run by Christians, which separated children from the «First Nations» from their parents and attempted to integrate them into Canadian society. A sensitive topic, of course. But subsequent investigations have not uncovered «mass graves.» However, many people—including Pope Francis, who made an apology visit to Canada—assumed the reports must be true and condemnatory. Meanwhile, dozens of churches burned.
For the above reasons and more, the Faith & Reason Institute, in partnership with Aid to the Church in Need USA, has launched a program we call «Faith under Siege.» It has a dual purpose: to better inform people about what is happening to Christians worldwide (around 330 million Christians are under threat of persecution) and to encourage us all to do something—at least pray—about it.
One of the organizations we have been working with is the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC), based in Vienna, Austria. The OIDAC has just documented, using the European Union’s criteria for «hate crimes,» that there were 29 anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe alone during January 2026:
In Italy (10), followed by Germany (8), France (7), Spain (3), Austria (2), by Poland (2), the Netherlands (1), Portugal (1), Romania (1), and Serbia (1). Outside the European Union, additional incidents were recorded in the United Kingdom (2) and Ukraine (1).
There were also at least 10 cases of arson in EU churches, along with other acts of vandalism, deliberately destroying tabernacles or other religious objects.
International bodies like the EU and the UN have been slow to recognize anti-Christian currents in their member states, although for years both have warned against antisemitism and «Islamophobia.» Earlier this month in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council organized its first state-sponsored event aimed at remedying that deficiency, under the title «Standing with Persecuted Christians: Defending the Faith and Christian Values.» And a Special EU Coordinator was called for to track anti-Christian offenses.
Although the speakers at the event were the usual suspects (i.e., the OIDAC, the Vatican, and Hungary), it is significant that they spoke about how difficult it is even to be openly Christian in schools and other public spaces these days.
For similar reasons, the Trump administration has created a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. It is good to recognize that it is also happening here. (Almost at the same time as the attack in Mexico, a church in Denver was vandalized, among the approximately 100 similar anti-Catholic outrages that occur in the United States annually).
But talking is easy. What we need now, everywhere and from everyone, is action and results.
About the author:
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.