A vile crime

[fpb]

I cannot do anything about it, but I have to describe my feelings. A crime took place yesterday in Chicago for whose odiousness I lack words. Some thug broke into one of the city's oldest churches (which had apparently survived the Great Fire of 1871) and stole some precious candlesticks and the relics of two great saints, Ste. Therese of Lisieux and St.Francesca Cabrini.

To understand how vile is this assault on our great dead, you have to understand who these women were. Ste. Therese was a French nun whose personal memories, accounts of a life filled with pain and fiercely dedicated to the Lord, are one of the most popular Catholic classics. She is one of three women named Doctors of the Church - meaning that their writings have a particularly close and profound relationship with the essence of Christian faith. This places her in the company of St.Augustine of Hippo, St.Thomas Aquinas, and similar giants. Mother Cabrini was a young nun with no English when, at the order of the great Pope Leo XIII, she took up the work of help and ministering to the enormous and forgotten Italian emigration to America. If Ste.Therese was a giant of mysticism, St.Francesca was a giant of practical work, building churches, hospitals, schools, orphanages. Her name is spread across the two parts of America, in Brazil and Argentina as well as the U.S.A.

These two women, rough contemporaries, represent between them everything that we call sanctity - goodness to the nth degree, the visible presence of the will of God on Earth; and they do so in such a way that people who read about them come not only to respect and admire them, but to love them. The assault upon their helpless remains, probably for the sake of gain, possibly out of mere thuggishness, is maybe not one of the worst, but certainly one of the lowest and most despicable acts that anything which may be zoologically described as a human being can commit.

Comments

[lyssiae.livejournal.com]

...I'm speechless. I really am. If someone loathes the Church enough to break in and steal valuable candlesticks, why would sacred relics be of interest to them?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The best (relatively speaking) hope is that they may be held for ransom. But it is also possible that they may have been just ripped from the reliquary out of thuggish fun and the hatred of sacred things, and just spilled on the ground somewhere. It is an ugly thing to think, but such minds do exist.