Youth renewal in Brazil missions

Movimento Vocare is a movement that brings youth to interact with mission agencies and expand how they think about their vocations. Since its founding in São Paulo in 2012, it has grown to hold an annual national conference (since 2015) plus regional events.

For Adriciane Portela, a law student, one of these events was where she first met Christian agencies that worked on legal

The annual number of “anti-Christian incidents” reported by the French government over the last decade has increased to 1,052 in 2019. The number was only 275 back in 2008.

Arson attacks at the Nantes Cathedral on July 18 and in six other French churches in the last year and a half are examples, according to Ellen Fantini, head of the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe.

“Incidents” usually means “vandalism with a message,” explains Fantini. “In France we see a lot of decapitation of statues, we see the destruction of objects” of symbolic and religious value.

Although other countries don’t keep the same records as the French, it is across the continent, Fantini states. “We see in Germany arsons and vandalism, we see it in Spain, we see it in the U.K. Really, I can’t say there is any place in Europe where this phenomenon is decreasing.”