Desecrations of Catholic places of worship in France have increased exponentially in recent months. Most recently, a church in Paris was vandalised using acts of extreme violence.
The vandalism occurred on the night of Sunday, July 14th at the church of Notre-Dame du Travail in the 14th arrondissement in the south of Paris. The building was defiled by explicit and violent tags calling for war, decapitation of Christians, and threatening to burn the church down.
The next day, the parishioners discovered a fire had broken out, but fortunately, it did not catch, thus avoiding irreparable damage.
Many of the inscriptions found were explicitly Islamic in nature: “Submit to Allah the infidel, pray 5 times a day,” “Bastard Jesus, only one god, Allah,” for example, could be read on the walls of the sanctuary.
Other damage was also reported. The organ was smashed, the sound system was damaged and the assailant even left excrement at the back of the building. One final act was particularly violent in symbolic terms. In the small community bar next to the church, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary was found in the sink, stabbed in the throat with a kitchen knife, accompanied by the inscriptions: “Mary, here is your fate”, “We Muslims we can’t accept this f*** religion.”
The parish vicar, Abbé Vincent de Mello, believes that the attacker was isolated, perhaps “a little deranged,” but clearly “hostile and threatening,” and notes that there was no systematic destruction. A few months ago, Notre-Dame du Travail was the target of theft and damage. The parish hopes to receive funding from the city or the Paris diocese to install a video surveillance system.
Notre-Dame du Travail church is located in a working-class district of Paris, with a large immigrant population in the vicinity. Abbé de Mello told Boulevard Voltaire that the area was hit hard by the riots in June 2023. “On Eid day in June, some people tried to get into the courtyard of the presbytery, because they knew we had a barbecue,” says the priest. On several occasions, young people shouted “Allah Akbar” during the mass, but that’s as far as it went. Since then, Islamist threats have been joined by antifascist graffiti.
Anti-Christian acts occur all over France and have been steadily and inexorably increasing for several years. The Ministry of the Interior has counted a thousand such acts in 2023 alone, 90% of which were attacks on property, churches, or cemeteries.
