BRAINTREE -- A statue of the Virgin Mary outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston was vandalized on Aug. 14, the eve of the feast of the Assumption.

A call to Boston Police that morning reported that an unknown individual had scrawled incoherent writings on the statue's pedestal in chalk.

"God made the cursed angel, the laiden (sic) angel made the wine," the writing said, along with the number 777.

Boston City Councilman Ed Flynn posted about the vandalism on X (formerly Twitter), saying that he recommended to Boston Police that it be investigated as a hate crime. Police are currently investigating the incident.

"We will draw no conclusions at this point about what would prompt someone to vandalize the statue of our Blessed Mother," Archdiocese of Boston spokesman Terry Donilon said in a statement. "However, we are praying for whoever is responsible."

A representative from the cathedral told The Pilot that it had no further comment about the incident.

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts swiftly condemned the graffiti as "the latest in a long series of criminal, anti-Catholic incidents in the Commonwealth, going back more than 15 years, which have, in the vast majority of cases, gone unsolved and unpunished."

The League, founded in 1995 for the purpose of "defending the Catholic faith and the civil rights of Catholics in the public forum," also praised Flynn for calling for a hate crime investigation.

The League's website features an ongoing list of incidents of vandalism of Catholic churches in Massachusetts. It currently lists 37 incidents having occurred since 2020, most prominently an arson attack at St. Mary Parish in Franklin on Oct. 23. The 100-year-old church suffered $1 million in damage and was closed for six months. The perpetrator remains at large.

In October 2023, Michael Patzelt of Attleboro was arrested and charged with assault and malicious destruction of property for causing $20,000 in damage to the crucifix outside the cathedral. Patzelt has a long history of vandalism and was homeless at the time of the incident. He tore the body of Christ away from his arms, leaving them dangling from the nails and swinging on the corpus as passersby looked on.

In 2016, an unknown perpetrator threw a rock at one of the cathedral's historic stained-glass windows, causing $3,000 in damage.

The Family Research Council, an evangelical Christian nonprofit, has published an annual report of attacks on all Christian churches since 2022.

The 2024 report found 415 attacks on churches, including vandalism, arson, threats, and physical assaults. This is lower than the 485 attacks in 2023, but is still "significantly higher" than attacks reported from 2018 to 2022.

Some of the attacks were motivated by political extremism or anti-Christian sentiment, the report found, while others "may have merely been victims of opportunistic vandalism."

Thirteen percent of recorded attacks were arson. According to the FBI, 1.9 percent of reported hate crimes in 2024 were anti-Catholic.