On the April 12, 2023, the rector of the Sainte-Madeleine Church in Angers found his church devastated: seven statues had been beheaded or amputated, the altar was vandalized, and many crosses were too. Mr. Verchère, Mayor of the city, and Mr. Darmanin, Minister of the Interior condemned the degradation. On the 18. April, a 40-year-old with criminal records named Brahim was arrested by the police, he was also taken to a hospital for psychiatric examination.
On Twitter, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, expressed his indignation and called these: "inadmissible decapitations of the statues of the church of Sainte Madeleine in Angers." He also said he "expresses [his] full support for the Catholics of Angers and France. Everything will be done to challenge the perpetrators of this attack on religious heritage."
"Decapitated statues, broken crosses, ransacked central altar. I strongly condemn this vandalism at the Sainte Madeleine church in Angers," also condemned Rima Abdul Malak, Minister of Culture, on Twitter. Attacking heritage is an attack on the foundation of our common history. Believers or not, we are all affected."
Father Magloire Djaba Tossou said: "What is striking is to see that the statues have been decapitated. But we can imagine the violence that must have been behind it and we would like to know what motivated such a person to take such a step by entering a church, a place of worship. For us, these are not just stones, they are symbols of our faith."
Less than two weeks earlier, on 30 March, the church of Saint Pierre in Trélazé, a suburb of Angers, was also ransacked. ‘Two monumental crosses were twisted to steal Christ, a plaster Little Jesus from Prague was smashed to bits and the Lenten cross was thrown away’, confirmed the parish priest, Don Geoffroy Bohineust, on Wednesday evening. However, the information only became known later as he and the town's mayor preferred not to divulge this information ‘so as not to give publicity to the perpetrator’. The same man has been identified as a perpetrator.