The number of cases went from 271 in 2021 to 294 in 2022. They should not be dismissed lightly.
by PierLuigi Zoccatelli
The Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA) released a report about vandalism directed against churches, chapels, and monasteries in Bavaria in 2022. The number of registered attacks was 294. A comparison with the previous years shows a constant growth in the number of incidents. They were 219 in 2019, 242 in 2020, and 271 in 2021. It seems that not even the COVID-19 quarantines slowed down the progress of this series.
As reported by the Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, which regularly monitors such incidents, “a spokesman of the Catholic diocese of Regensburg [stated that cases included]: ‘For example, figures of saints were destroyed or damaged, people smoked and urinated in church rooms, church walls were smeared or fires were set inside the church.’” One of the most serious attacks happened when the historical church of St. Nicholas in Spalt was targeted by an arsonist.
The trend continues in 2023. According to the same Observatory, on January 10 somebody painted “red graffiti on the Cathedral of Augsburg that said ‘F*ck Jesus! He would have wanted it this way!’” while “other cases have been reported in Munich, where the Jesus figure was stolen. In an Augsburg Catholic church perpetrators threw eggs and left insulting graffiti on the wall against the Word of God.”
These cases are often taken lightly by the media and attributed to “drunken teenagers” or “pranksters.” Their number, however, shows that they are part of a broader phenomenon of anti-Catholicism and hate speech against Christians. Hate crimes have a tendency to become increasingly violent. Both the authorities and the media should consider them a serious and alarming phenomenon.
PierLuigi Zoccatelli (1965-2024) taught Sociology of Religions at Pontifical Salesian University, Torino, and Sociology of Esotericism at the University of Turin. He was deputy director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, and the associate editor of The Journal of CESNUR. Among other affiliations, he was a member of the scientific committee of the Interdepartmental Center for Research in Religious Sciences “Erik Peterson” (CSR) of the University of Turin, and of Contemporary Religions And Faiths in Transition (CRAFT), a research center of the Department of Cultures, Politics and Societies of the University of Turin. He was also a member of the section “Sociology of Religion” of the Italian Sociology Association (AIS), and of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). He is the author of several books and articles in the field of New Religious Movements and Western Esotericism, and co-director of the widely reviewed Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy. His writings has appeared in 12 countries and in 8 languages.
