BROOKLYN, N.Y. — A brazen robbery at a Catholic church in Brooklyn, New York, has left parishioners shaken.
“We all just thought that a sacred space would never be violated,” Father Frank Tumino, pastor of St. Augustine Catholic Church, told WCBS-TV after a $2 million tabernacle was stolen sometime between Thursday and Saturday afternoon.
According to a statement issued Sunday by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the priest discovered that someone had entered the church with a power saw, cut open the altar that housed items used for the communion ritual, stole the altar’s solid gold tabernacle and decapitated a statue of an angel, The New York Times reported.
“To know that a burglar entered the most sacred space of our beautiful church and took great pains to cut into a security system is a heinous act of disrespect,” Tumino stated.
Other holy items taken from the tabernacle had been strewn across the altar as well, the Times reported.
New York Police Department verified to WCBS that the rare, 19th-century, 18-karat gold tabernacle adorned with jewels is worth about $2 million.
“This is such a shock. It’s such an act of evil,” parishioner Sharon Dawson told WCBS.
The church, a large brownstone nestled in the heart of the Park Slope neighborhood and known as the area’s “Notre Dame,” began as an anchor for Brooklyn’s German and Irish Catholic communities in 1888, the Times reported.
According to police, the stolen tabernacle was cast the same year.
A safe in the church was also cut open, but it was empty, the diocese stated, calling the burglary a “brazen crime of disrespect and hate.”