CV NEWS FEED // An explosion damaged the monstrance in an adoration chapel in Pennsylvania this week. It was the 500th attack on a Catholic church property since 2020.
WFMZ reported that security camera footage shows a man entering the chapel attached to St. Teresa of Calcutta Church in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, on May 6, shortly after 9 p.m. He placed a quarter-stick of dynamite on the altar and lit the wick, causing an explosion 15 seconds later.
Police arrested 32-year-old Kyle Kuczynski in connection with the crime, charging him with ethnic intimidation, arson, reckless endangerment, and risking catastrophe.
The explosion damaged the monstrance, snapping its decorative angels in half. The blast also broke glass candle holders and shattered the stained-glass windows, which were repurposed from another church.
Father Kevin Gallagher told WFMZ that the damages to the windows cost more than $15,000 and the parish will not be able to repair them.
“These (stained-glass) windows came from the Italian Church Sacred Heart. You’ll never get them again,” added Diane Britton, the church secretary. “I never ever in my wildest dreams thought something would happen like this.”
Fr. Gallagher noted that the security cameras show the same man entering the chapel at least three times in the week prior to the explosion, including on the afternoon of May 6. The priest described the suspect as “stalking” the place.
“That’s kinda scary,” Fr. Gallagher said. “It’s one thing if somebody has an impulse thing. But this wasn’t an impulse thing. It was something he actually planned out and was foiled twice because people were in the chapel.”
When the man entered the chapel on the afternoon of May 6, some sisters of the Missionaries of Charity were present and shooed him away from the altar. Their order’s foundress, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, visited the chapel 30 years ago.
“She’d probably say pray for him, cause that’s the way she was,” Fr. Gallagher said. “And again, we say the same thing. I firmly believe he’s a disturbed person.”
Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, built and maintains a tracker that has marked every act of violence against Catholic churches since 2020.
“Catholics around the world are watching for white smoke this week, but this parish in Pennsylvania sadly had to deal with a very different kind of white smoke,” Valentine said after the 500th attack. “We have begged for federal action on the plague of violence against our churches for years, and we need it now.”
The Trump administration recently signaled it intends to take violence against churches seriously. Last week, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice pledged to prosecute attacks on churches in an interview.
CatholicVote Vice President Joshua Mercer echoed Valentine’s comments this week. “We are calling on the Department of Justice to investigate this recent attack as well as the hundreds of other cases which were ignored under the Biden administration, and we hope they will file federal charges where appropriate,” Mercer said. “We also ask for federal law enforcement resources to be deployed to protect Catholic churches and other places of worship. A clear message must be sent to anti-Catholic bigots that violence will not be tolerated.”
The post 500th Catholic church attack since 2020: Man detonates explosive on perpetual adoration chapel altar appeared first on CatholicVote org.