'Not a pretty sight' A Virgin Mary statue was found hanging at Stewartstown Presbyterian Church.

York Daily Record ^ | 18 December A.D. 2006 | Brent Burkey

[lightman]

'Not a pretty sight' A Virgin Mary statue was found hanging at Stewartstown Presbyterian Church. By BRENT BURKEY Daily Record/Sunday News Article Launched: 12/19/2006 06:04:14 AM

rd/Sunday News Article Launched: 12/19/2006 06:04:14 AM EST

Dec 19, 2006 — Lori Adams went to work early Monday morning and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

But someone else did and told the church secretary that a Virgin Mary lawn ornament was hanging by the neck in the parking lot of Stewartstown Presbyterian Church.

"It was not a pretty sight when I came into work this morning," said Adams, who added that vandalism had not struck the church in about a year. She called the display that was placed overnight Sunday into Monday "sick."

According to the church and local police, the nearly 2½-foot-tall Virgin Mary figurine was bound by the neck with a rope and tied to a light post hanging from the southeast corner of the church building on College Avenue in Stewartstown.

Someone must have climbed onto the church's roof to commit the crime that the Rev. Bob LaForce called "pretty sick."

A motive for the crime is unknown.

Stewartstown Police Chief George Cunningham said the department wants to talk with whoever might have had a lawn ornament depicting the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus stolen recently.

Any other help would also be appreciated, Cunningham said.

The hanging was the first case of vandalism at the church since LaForce became pastor less than a year ago.

Adams said a few months prior to his appointment, someone had bent handicapped parking signs and shot out a few windows.

"Blasphemous," LaForce said.

IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION

Stewartstown Police are asking anyone with information about a Virgin Mary lawn ornament that was stolen in the past few days or about the hanging of the ornament at Stewartstown Presbyterian Church Sunday into Monday to contact the department at 717-993-5308.

[Earthdweller]

"Perhaps you have forgotten the St. Batholomew's Day Massacre...."

I, for one, will never forget. It was the Christian 9/11 wakeup call.

Even so, it's too bad the French have blamed all Christians for any past grievous offenses and have tried to wipe-out all religion using examples such as the Massacre.

There is such a thing as forgiveness.

[Wallace T.]

It WAS a long time ago (1572). The Protestant side did a lot of ugly things in the 16th and 17th Centuries as well. Neither group acted in a Christian manner during the Wars of Religion. Even in our own country with our Constitutional prohibition of a national church, we have had a fair number of ugly incidents, from the persecution of Quakers and Baptists by the New England Puritans, to the Know Nothing era, when Catholic churches and convents were burned and sacked, to the harsh treatment of Mormons in the Midwest, culminating in the destruction of Nauvoo and the killing of their first prophet, to the harassment of Jews and Catholics by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the anti-Semitism on the part of groups such as the "Protestant" Silver Shirts and the "Catholic" Christian Front in the years before Pearl Harbor.

We must deal with the plank in out own eye before we worry about the speck in our neighbor's eye.