The new year is off to a grim start already for Catholics around the world as anti-Christian hostility proliferates across the West. New Year’s Day saw a 150-year-old former Catholic church in Amsterdam destroyed by fire, leaving behind nothing but rubble and scorched walls. According to Catholic News Agency, it is unclear whether or not arson was the cause of the fire.
The rise in Islamic immigration coincided with the proliferation of the postwar progressive ideology in Europe.
Just days earlier, the Holy Thorn Cistercian Monastery church in Valladolid, Spain, was violated: the tabernacle was forced open and the perpetrator stole the Blessed Sacrament, which Catholics hold to be the Body and Blood of Christ Jesus. Earlier in 2025, the tabernacle of Our Lady of the Meadow church in the nearby town Arroyo de la Encomienda, on the outskirts of Valladolid, was also violated and the Blessed Sacrament stolen.
According to the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe), three more Catholic churches were targeted between Christmas and New Year’s. In the Bavarian church of St. Maria, Haßlach, unidentified individuals set a fire using torn-out prayer book pages on Christmas Day. The fire did not spread, but police shared that the church’s property was damaged. Unidentified assailants and detonated an explosive device and fired shotguns and handguns into San Filippo Neri Catholic church in Palermo, Italy. Thanks be to God, the church was unoccupied at the time and no one was hurt. On December 30, “unknown perpetrators” defaced St. Johann Evangelist Church in Vienna, covering the church’s walls with Arabic graffiti and an Antifa symbol.
Over the course of last month alone, OIDAC Europe reported 15 separate instances of hostility against Christians, ranging from desecration of church property, urinating in holy water fonts, and the vandalism of nativity scenes to terrorist plots, arson, and even an attempt to kill a Catholic priest by firebombing his car. The attacks largely pointed to two types of perpetrators: Islamists and leftists.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Muslim population of Europe was relatively small, numbering only about 1,000 in some countries, like Germany and Italy, and fewer than 100 in countries such as Ireland. The postwar era saw a major influx of Muslim immigration into Europe. Italy was caught largely unprepared: as a significant emigree state, the nation had few immigration laws on the books, and Muslims from Africa and the Middle East took advantage of this fact, accounting for roughly half of all new arrivals by the 1990s; the Muslim population in Italy leapt from just over 50,000 in 1980 to nearly one million by the end of the 1990s. Germany’s 1961 “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) program imported hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia. By the 1990s, over three million Muslims were residents in Germany.
The story was much the same in other European nations: worker and student programs imported hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Africa and the Middle East, and those workers and students brought their families with them.
The rise in Islamic immigration coincided with the proliferation of the postwar progressive ideology in Europe. The anti-nationalism which frenzied shame and fear imposed upon the continent promoted multiculturalism and oversaw the gradual dilution and erosion over the succeeding decades of Europe’s Christian identity. For centuries, Christian Europe waged war against Islam, fending off the Ottoman Empire’s violent incursions. But leftists opened the gates and invited the barbarians into the city.
READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:
What the Left Doesn’t Get Right About Christmas
