Violence against Catholic churches has been on the rise for the past few years, both secular and religious organizations have warned. Now, some are levying criticism at state and federal authorities for what they have said was an inadequate response to such concerns following Wednesday’s shooting at Minneapolis’s Annunciation Catholic School that left two young children dead.
Data collected by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, CatholicVote, and the A-Mark Foundation all point to high levels of vandalism, arson, threats, and shootings targeting Catholic churches in recent years. Some Minnesotans and national political commentators have said that, given these threats were known long before the shooting, the response of public safety officials was lacking.
For instance, leaders of independent and Catholic schools in Minnesota penned a letter to Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) in April 2023 expressing an “urgent and critical need” to make “sure our schools are secure and safe considering the most recent, and continuing attacks, on our schools in this country and in our state,” citing the then recent attack on Christian school children in Tennessee.
Though Walz was reportedly supportive of providing funding to better secure schools, no resources were disbursed for that purpose.
After the request of religious school leaders was ignored in 2023, attacks against Catholic churches occurred at high levels.
A tracker of attacks against Catholic churches maintained by CatholicVote, a conservative religious advocacy organization, recorded 235 incidents between 2023 and 2025. Since the organization began tracking attacks on May 28, 2020, it has recorded over 500 attacks — 10 of which occurred in Minnesota.
Examples of attacks include everything from graffiti and destruction of statues to arsonists destroying entire churches and assailants attacking churchgoers with deadly weapons. CatholicVote estimated that these attacks have cost Catholic churches north of $35 million in damages since 2020.
In one example recorded by CatholicVote, a man named Marko Asaulyuk nonfatally stabbed a parishioner outside of San Francisco’s historic Saints Peter and Paul Church in April 2024. The man reportedly yelled “Jesus is not real” before stabbing a parishioner eight times.
The stabbing wasn’t the only incident at the San Francisco church to appear in CatholicVote’s database. In October 2023, another man assaulted a parishioner at the church. Police arrived shortly after and, while chasing the individual, he threw a pipe bomb and a Molotov cocktail at them. It remains unclear if he intended to use the explosives on the church.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has maintained a similar tracker of crimes targeting Catholic churches, documenting 22 attacks so far in 2025, compared to 56 in 2024. Among these were a man shooting and killing a priest outside a Kansas rectory, a person attempting to burn a cross outside of St. Bernard Catholic Church in Indiana, and an assailant ransacking a Wichita, Kansas, church to scrawl satanic imagery on its walls.
Disagreement with the Catholic Church’s position on abortion appears in both CatholicVote’s and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’s lists as a common motivation for attacks on churches. For instance, in the lead-up to a contentious 2023 abortion vote in Ohio, over a dozen churches saw signs stolen and their properties vandalized.
An October 2023 report compiled by the A-Mark Foundation, a secular nonpartisan nonprofit organization focused on journalism, identified 59 violent attacks, such as shootings or stabbings, at places of worship between 2012 and 2022, resulting in 79 deaths and 83 injuries. According to the report, Catholic churches made up just 6% of the nation’s religious congregations but were the target of 13% of attacks on places of worship.
In one of the most striking examples catalogued by the A-Mark Foundation, a Florida man rammed his van through the front doors of a Catholic church, then poured gasoline on the foyer and lit a fire as parishioners were preparing to celebrate Mass. No churchgoers were injured, and the local fire department quickly put out the flame. Federal authorities charged the perpetrator with a hate crime as they determined his attack was motivated by the “religious character” of the church.
Some have criticized the FBI for a lack of diligence in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting in Minneapolis.
“Instead of chasing down traditional Catholics, parents at school board meetings, and thousands of J6 Trump supporters in the biggest operation in history, maybe the FBI should have kept eyes on real domestic threats,” Australian American columnist Miranda Devine wrote on X.
Robin Westman, the Minneapolis shooter who identified as transgender, had a limited history with law enforcement before his attack, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.
Police arrived at Westman’s home in 2018 for a mental health-related welfare check, and a “criminal offense” was reported at his residence in 2016, but nothing came of it.
“There is nothing in the investigation so far that would lead us to believe that anything was missed,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said.
Alvin Winston, the FBI agent in charge of Minneapolis, said the agency had prior contact with Westman.
The FBI, for its part, is investigating the attack against Annunciation Catholic School as a religiously motivated hate crime.
Federal officials provide resources to places of worship to guard against attacks such as these. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awards over $100 million per year through its Nonprofit Security Grant Program to fund physical security upgrades such as cameras, lighting, barriers, access controls, and training for places of worship. The program is widely supported by U.S. religious organizations.
Under previous administrations, some of this funding ended up in the hands of Islamic groups with links to terrorist organizations.
Catholics are far from the only religious group to have experienced an increase in targeted attacks.
ANTI-CATHOLIC HATE IGNORED: MEDIA AND POLITICIANS SIDESTEP OBVIOUS MOTIVE IN MINNEAPOLIS MASSACRE
For example, the A-Mark Foundation report also found that Muslims and Jews disproportionately faced religious violence in their places of worship.
Meanwhile, an August report published by the Family Research Council recorded “415 hostile incidents in 2024” targeting places of worship. This represented a slight decline from the 485 incidents recorded in 2023 but remains well above the 2018 to 2021 norm of between 50 and 100 per year. The Family Research Council’s report included attacks on Christian churches regardless of their tradition. According to the report, churches endured at least 14 bomb threats, 28 gun-related incidents, and 55 arsons last year.