The bishop or a priest designated by him stands outside the church and blesses the doors and front walls with holy water. After a prayer, he enters the church and processes to the altar, where he recites a litany of the saints. He then sprinkles the walls of the church, significant interior furnishings and the location where damage was done.
The hosts found outside on the ground were wrapped in a cloth and buried under a statue on the parish grounds, Msgr. Rebman said. This ensured that no one would step on the buried hosts. Hosts that fall on the ground are normally dissolved in water and poured into a sacrarium, a sink that empties under a church, but the number of hosts involved at
St. Michael made that impractical.
Joan Ilgenfritz, the administrative assistant at St. Michael’s and also a parishioner, said she took the damage personally. “It’s as if your home or something very personal to you has been desecrated,” she said.
Ilgenfritz said other items damaged included a broken door, ripped screens and a broken door handle on a reconciliation room.
Father McCloskey said the reconciliation service was a morale booster.
“It was uplifting for me, lifting me out of my doldrums. It was powerful to realize for one moment the sacredness of all that we do,” he said.
Security system pays off
The break-in at St. Polycarp was captured on the parish’s four-month-old security system cameras, something Father Flowers had installed after several minor incidents over the
past few years.
“That, unfortunately, is the deck we’ve been dealt. It’s to protect the people and to protect the sanctity of the Eucharist,” he said.
Some parishioners who attended Mass on Friday for the Assumption were in tears upon hearing the news. That is understandable, he said, because parishioners see the parish as their home and because it is a “special and sacred place.”
Some of the items Morris allegedly placed into a bag he picked up in the sacristy have special meaning for Father Flowers. His mother gave him the chalice, and Pope John Paul II blessed his rosary. He said he reblessed them even though they were not desecrated “just so that I could use them again without getting the willies.”
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Ironically, St. Polycarp had intended to hold a prayer service last Friday for the people of St. Michael’s.
“We didn’t expect we’d be quite so much in solidarity with them,” Father Flowers said.
Printed with permission from the Dialog, newspaper for the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware.